Method and apparatus for abstraction of physical hardware implementation to logical software drivers

Abstract

A method and apparatus are provided for abstraction of a physical hardware implementation to logical software drivers. An operating system kernel includes a device driver layer, an enhanced I/O abstraction layer and physical hardware implementation details layer. The physical hardware implementation details layer encapsulates hardware details for the physical hardware implementation. The enhanced I/O abstraction layer abstracts the hardware details for the device driver layer and creates unique logical I/O device structures for each embedded function in the physical hardware implementation. By using the enhanced I/O abstraction layer, device drivers maintain their independence from the physical hardware implementation. Using the enhanced I/O abstraction layer also enables a single driver with one binary image to support embedded functions spread out across multiple chip implementations, and multiple instances of an embedded function on one or multiple chips.

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