Bus-Agnostic Drivers (Compact 2013)
3/26/2014
A bus-agnostic driver can execute on different buses. For example, a bus-agnostic driver can execute on a PCI bus, a 16-bit PC Card bus, or a bus that is specific to a hardware platform. Typically, you can more easily migrate bus-agnostic drivers between platforms than other types of drivers.
A bus-agnostic driver does not call functions that are specific to a hardware platform. Each bus-agnostic driver gets its resources from the registry, requests configuration information from its parent bus driver, sets power states through its parent bus driver, and translates bus addresses to system addresses through its parent bus driver.
A bus-agnostic driver is a standard driver that is relatively simple to implement, and which can be shared by various implementations for the same hardware chipset. For example, the bus-agnostic PCI NE2000 driver works correctly for the NE2000 PCMCIA card. The NE2000 PCMCIA card functions the same with the PCI NE2000 driver as it does with the PCMCIA NE2000 driver.