Device Management in OS
- I/O devices are the pieces of hardware used by a human (or other system) to communicate with a computer.
- Activating and controlling the peripheral devices. In a desktop computer, the operating system interacts with the device drivers for peripheral control.
Device Driver
- Device driver is a utility software.
- The computer communicates with peripheral devices through device drivers.
- A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without knowing the precise hardware details.
- A device driver depends on both the hardware and the operating system.
Spooling
- Spooling is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on line.
- Spooling refers to putting data of various I/O jobs in a buffer. This buffer is a special area in memory or hard disk which is accessible to I/O devices.
- Data is sent to and stored in memory or other volatile storage until the program or computer requests it for execution.
Example
- The most common spooling application is print spooling.
- In print spooling, documents are loaded into a buffer (usually an area on a disk), and then the printer pulls them off the buffer at its own rate.
- Because the documents are in a buffer where they can be accessed by the printer,
you can perform other operations on the computer while the printing takes place in the background. - Spooling also lets you place a number of print jobs on a queue instead of waiting for each one to finish before specifying the next one
