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Native Device Drivers

This part of Designing PCI Cards and Drivers for Power Macintosh Computers tells you how to design and write run-time native device drivers that support the PCI-bus compatible Power Macintosh architecture. These drivers are called native because they are written for execution by the native instruction set of the PowerPC microprocessor. This part consists of the following chapters:

• Native Driver Overview presents the general concepts and framework applicable to native drivers for PowerPC Macintosh computers.
• Finding, Initializing, and Replacing Drivers describes how the Macintosh hardware and software architecture determine how drivers and devices are matched, and discusses what driver and card designers can do to improve the compatibility of their products on the Macintosh platform.
• Writing Native Drivers gives you details of native driver design and coding, including how to use services provided by the Mac OS Driver Loader Library.
• Driver Loader Library describes the Driver Loader Library (DLL), a CFM shared-library extension to the Macintosh Device Manager.
• Name Registry describes the Mac OS data structure that stores device information extracted from the PCI device tree.
• Driver Services Library details the general support that Mac OS provides for device drivers, including interrupt and timing services.
• Expansion Bus Manager discusses a collection of PCI bus-specific system services available to native device drivers.
• Graphics Drivers describes the calls serviced by typical display drivers.
• Network Drivers describes how to construct a sample network driver.
• SCSI Drivers describes how to construct a sample native SCSI Interface Module (SIM) compatible with SCSI Manager 4.3.