Bus and Port Drivers

Bus Drivers

IDE Controller Minidrivers

Describes the integrated drive electronics (IDE) architecture and IDE controller and minicontroller drivers. IDE drivers are part of a disk-drive interface in which the controller electronics reside on the drive itself so that separate adapter cards are not needed. The IDE architecture and IDE controller and minicontroller drivers are supported on the Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Windows 2000 operating systems.

IEEE 1394 Bus Drivers

Describes IEEE 1394 bus features, including installation, I/O requests, emulation drivers, samples and tools, and the IEC-61883 protocol driver.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus Drivers

Describes Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus client drivers and describes how you can access the configuration space of PCI devices. A PCI bus is a dynamically configurable I/O bus that is described by the PCI Local Bus Specification.

PCMCIA Memory Card Bus Drivers

Describes PCMCIA bus drivers so that you can design and develop a driver for a PCMCIA memory card. The topics provide information about the features of PCMCIA device drivers, including information about the attribute memory and IRQ routing of PCMCIA devices.

Secure Digital (SD) Card Drivers

Describes features of the SD card technology, including driver stacks, SD bus interfaces, and card property and command requests.

SCSI Miniport Drivers

Includes information to help you develop miniport drivers for storage devices that are connected to a SCSI bus. The SCSI Port driver supplies system support for storage devices that are connected to a SCSI bus. SCSI bus drivers are used with SCSI devices, such as printers, and with some network connections, such as local area networks (LANs). SCSI bus drivers are supported on the Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Windows 2000 operating systems.

Simple Peripheral Bus (SPB) Drivers

Describes how to write drivers for simple peripheral bus (SPB) controllers and for SPB-connected peripheral devices. The SPB category includes synchronous serial buses such as I2C and SPI.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) Drivers

Describes Universal Serial Bus (USB) support in the Windows operating system. The topics in this section provide an overview of the USB driver stack architecture, the Microsoft-provided USB drivers, and the DDIs included with the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) that you can use to develop a custom client driver for a USB device.

Port Drivers

General-Purpose I/O (GPIO) Drivers

Describes how to write a driver for a general-purpose I/O (GPIO) controller device. A GPIO controller configures GPIO pins to function as low-bandwidth data I/O channels, device-select outputs, and interrupt-request inputs. In Windows Developer Preview and later versions of Windows, the GPIO class extension (GpioClx) simplifies the task of writing a driver for a GPIO controller.

Parallel Ports (Legacy)

Describes Universal Serial Bus (USB) support in the Windows operating system. The topics in this section provide an overview of the USB driver stack architecture, the Microsoft-provided USB drivers, and the DDIs included with the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) that you can use to develop a custom client driver for a USB device.

Serial Controller Drivers

Describes the serial class extension (SerCx). SerCx simplifies the development of drivers for serial controller devices (UARTs) that use RS-232 ports to communicate with peripheral devices.

This section also describes the Microsoft-supplied serial driver, Serial.sys, for Plug and Play serial devices and COM ports, and the Serenum service that is used with a serial port function driver to enumerate devices that are connected to an RS-232 port.