eCos Reference Manual
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# Chapter 13. Device Driver Interface to the Kernel

This chapter describes the API that device drivers may use to interact with the kernel and HAL. It is primarily concerned with the control and management of interrupts and the synchronization of ISRs, DSRs and threads.

The same API will be present in configurations where the kernel is not present. In this case the functions will be supplied by code acting directly on the HAL.

# Interrupt Model

eCos presents a three level interrupt model to device drivers. This consists of Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) that are invoked in response to a hardware interrupt; Deferred Service Routines (DSRs) that are invoked in response to a request by an ISR; and threads that are the clients of the driver.

Hardware interrupts are delivered with minimal intervention to an ISR. The HAL decodes the hardware source of the interrupt and calls the ISR of the attached interrupt object. This ISR may manipulate the hardware but is only allowed to make a restricted set of calls on the driver API. When it returns, an ISR may request that its DSR should be scheduled to run.

A DSR will be run when it is safe to do so without interfering with the scheduler. Most of the time the DSR will run immediately after the ISR, but if the current thread is in the scheduler, it will be delayed until the thread is finished. A DSR is allowed to make a larger set of driver API calls, including, in particular, being able to call `cyg_drv_cond_signal()` to wake up waiting threads.

Finally, threads are able to make all API calls and in particular are allowed to wait on mutexes and condition variables.

For a device driver to receive interrupts it must first define ISR and DSR routines as shown below, and then call `cyg_drv_interrupt_create()`. Using the handle returned, the driver must then call `cyg_drv_interrupt_attach()` to actually attach the interrupt to the hardware vector.

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