Curiosity beyond abstractions: how do device drivers work?

Posted by Yktula on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Yktula
Published on 2010-05-16T21:58:18Z Indexed on 2010/05/16 22:00 UTC
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abstraction

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Hardware

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driver

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device-driver

Everything I've seen on *nix has been a set of abstractions off hardware, but I'm curious as to how the hardware works.
I've programmed in assembly, but that's still only a set of abstractions.

How do device drivers work (at a lower level)?
How does a processor understand assembly opcodes (as bytecode)?

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