Abstract

An adaptive driver and method is presented for communicating between an operating system of a computer and various peripheral devices connected to the computer via a peripheral bus. Operating characteristics and input/output characteristics of the peripheral device and all intervening hardware devices placed between the operating system and the peripheral device are noted in a linked set of data fields, i.e., a driver stack. Serialized data transfers are coordinated using the driver stack, and each request for a data transfer is submitted to the stack in the form of an input/output request packet (IRP). Unlike conventional practice, in which IRPs must be pre-defined and hard-coded to conform to the characteristics of a particular peripheral device, the adaptive driver derives the device characteristics from data structures maintained by the operating system and constructs IRPs accordingly. Thus, a driver embodying the method presented herein is capable of supporting a variety of dissimilar USB peripherals, requiring substantially no modification of the driver software.