What is the difference between a driver (device drivers) and a driver stack? I keep hearing people talking about "driver stacks" but I have never really heard of this before... Thanks!
+4
A:
A driver is...well...a driver.
A driver stack is when drivers plug into each other, each one adding a bit to the chain. Like, say, OpenGL or DirectX drivers that use your video card's driver, which in turn uses PCI Express or AGP or whatever drivers to set up resources and push pixels and such. Or your USB devices' drivers that of course have to use the USB drivers in order to communicate.
It's technically possible to have a "stack" consisting of one driver, but when people say "stack", they almost always mean more than one. Or they're just trying to sound like they know what they're talking about.
cHao
2010-07-08 02:51:06