Case Study: A Simple IDE Disk Driver

Understand how a simple IDE disk driver interfaces with the operating system by studying device registers, command protocols, data transfers, and interrupt handling. This lesson covers the practical workings of disk I/O and driver structure using xv6 as an example.

We'll cover the following...

- Basic protocol
- xv6 IDE driver protocol

To dig a little deeper here, let’s take a quick look at an actual device: an IDE disk driver“AT Attachment Interface for Disk Drives” by Lawrence J. Lamers. Reference number: ANSI X3.221, 1994. Available: ftp://ftp.t10.org/t13/project/d0791r4c-ATA-1.pdf. A rather dry document about device interfaces. Read it at your own peril.. We summarize the protocol as described in this reference“Hard Disk Driver” by Washington State Course Homepage. Available online at this site: http://eecs.wsu.edu/ ̃cs460/cs560/HDdriver.html. A nice summary of a simple IDE disk drive’s interface and how to build a device driver for it.; we’ll ...