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Device Configuration

All device configuration information is stored in the Name Registry. All resources required by the driver will be provided to device drivers in a family-specific way or through the Name Registry. Device driver writers must follow these rules:

Do not use the Resource Manager.
Do not use the file system.
Do not use the PRAM utilities.

Support for these mechanisms is not available to drivers after the first generation of Power Macintosh computers. The Name Registry provides two kinds of persistent storage; see Name Registry for details on how these facilities are used. In short and in general, do not use the Macintosh Toolbox from main driver code.

All information required by device drivers is located in the Name Registry. Native driver initialization routines are passed a Name Registry node pointer that identifies the corresponding device. The Name Registry programming interface provides access routines to the interesting properties required by devices. See Standard Properties, for names and values of properties of interest to PCI drivers for use with Mac OS.

Native drivers should not make calls to, or expect data from, the Resource Manager. There are two reasons for this rule:

The Resource Manager is an application service, not a system service.
Information stored in resources is unwieldy because it is impossible to distinguish code from data resources in a paging-protected or memory-protected way.

Configuration data must be supplied by the expert controlling the device or stored as property data in the Name Registry.