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Driver Types

Character and Block Drivers

There are three kinds of drivers that are recognized by the OS and are visible to applications. Two are POSIX standard device driver types, one is non-standard. There are also internal OS components that may also be considered to be drivers or, more correctly, lower-half drivers. But we will not consider drivers not visible to applications here.

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There is also the complement, the loop device that converts a character driver into a block driver. Loop devices are commonly used to format a file system image in RAM.

MTD Drivers

And the non-standard driver is:

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