Memory Embedded Device Drivers

This concept looks into new emerging possibility of embedding device driver into hardware device itself.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide information about device drivers.
Instead it goes into advanced concept of embedding device drivers into hardware device itself.

For those who are unfamiliar with device drivers following is a simple information.
You can google for more details of device drivers.

Device driver is a software program which is meant to help operating system to communicate with piece of hardware device.
Without device driver, operating system cannot use hardware device.

Every piece of hardware installed into your computer system has driver associated with it.
This includes any graphic cards, keyboard, mouse etc.

Few operating systems are shipped with set of device drivers supplied by hardware vendors into it.
If you are familiar with Windows operating system, you may have observed that when you connect a new device, operating system recognises it automatically and sometime installs device driver automatically. This becomes possible because operating system contains device driver of that device inside it or can locate it on CD or internet location and install it.

In many non-plug-play operating systems, you have to install driver manually.

Also similar to any program, device driver is specific to operating system, so you need a different device driver for different operating systems.
So driver written for Windows does not work on Linux and vice-versa.

Disadvantage of current system:

1. If operating system does not contain suitable driver embedded, device driver should be supplied separately.
2. Sometime operating system installs wrong driver for the device and device cannot function properly.
3. How many times you get a hardware device and it contains warning to install supplied CD before connecting device.
4. Sometime supplied device driver does not work, because its corrupted and its unusable. You cannot locate device driver anywhere on internet. You are left no choice but throw away device.

Solution:
Advances into flash memory are making it possible to have cheap memory available in tiny size. For example MMC, SD, flash, and so on…
What if vendor embed a small flash memory into device itself. Then store main device driver files for all operating systems into it.

When device is connected, operating system will detect device with flash memory on it. It will find suitable device driver from embedded memory and install it automatically.

If device driver contains many interactive files which use rich interfaces which might be expensive to embed into memory, then embed minimum basic required device drivers and then supply rest utilities on CD.

This way, operating systems don’t need to ship with thousands of vendor device drivers. Also it will ensure that correct device driver for device is installed. There is no need to supply separate device drivers for the device.
Wherever device is sent, it will work properly due to inbuilt device driver.

What do you think about this idea? I would like to hear from you…