Driver developement - Skills?

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Ice2Cool

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Hey guys,

I was chatting with my friends today and this question came up which I find quite interesting - what exactly does one study in order to design drivers for hardware?

Specifically we were talking about how they have ported android to the iphone and then the question arose as to what skills does a person need to be able to do that? Especially how they go abotu creating drivers for the wifi, gps, etc.

Do they need to know alot about hardware design and logic etc? Or is it all software?

Cheers
 
From what I've seen an understanding of the underlying technology/hardware certainly helps, but I doubt that is a requirement. I'd imagine one would need to basically reverse-engineer hooks (to the hardware) in the existing system, and attach the new OS to those hooks. I dunno, C/C++?

Can't be too hard, eh? :erm:
 
Raithlin said:
From what I've seen an understanding of the underlying technology/hardware certainly helps, but I doubt that is a requirement. I'd imagine one would need to basically reverse-engineer hooks (to the hardware) in the existing system, and attach the new OS to those hooks. I dunno, C/C++?

Can't be too hard, eh? :erm:
Click to expand...

Lol thanks man. Do you know where I can read up more on this? I really got no idea where to start. I know some VBA, C++, Java, but this goes into a level I have no clue about.
 
Although this is specific to Windows CE, here is a pretty good summary of what is entailed in building device drivers... and here's a CodeProject.com article on driver development (Find the entire series here).

They should give you a good idea. Any further than that is going to cost you in Google time. ;)
 
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You would need a good knowledge of system architecture and design for your foundations. You will also need C skills as many drivers are written at this level. Pretty much the skills embedded system designers need :)
 
Start with Linux. Developing drivers will teach you more about how it works. Read the source; it's an invaluable experience.
 
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