🔌Kernel Drivers

How the kernel drivers work and their role in the kernel

The kernel drivers allows your kernel to provide interfaces for different purposes, from console to filesystem. This is to present the kernel your implementation of different driver types. It's not a device driver, though!

The kernel drivers can be called using either the properties that point to the current driver of each driver type or the DriverHandler.GetDriver<TResult>() function found under the KS.Drivers namespace. These two will return an appropriate driver interface that actually allows you to call their functions that each driver of the same type implements. The types of kernel drivers are listed below:

Driver	Interface	Base	Description
Random	IRandomDriver	BaseRandomDriver	Random number generator drivers
Console	IConsoleDriver	BaseConsoleDriver	Console drivers
Network	INetworkDriver	BaseNetworkDriver	Network drivers
Filesystem	IFilesystemDriver	BaseFilesystemDriver	Filesystem drivers
Encryption	IEncryptionDriver	BaseEncryptionDriver	Encryption drivers
Regexp	IRegexpDriver	BaseRegexpDriver	Regular expression drivers

Each driver contains its own interface containing its own method definitions and their signatures. These interfaces are the ones that you must implement with your mod. The most basic interface for the kernel drivers is IDriver found in the same namespace, which is implemented by the driver-specific interfaces.

The final driver class implementation must implement both the base driver-specific base class and its interface, such as:

internal class Terminal : BaseConsoleDriver, IConsoleDriver

If you have a kernel driver that you wish to register, you'll have to register the kernel driver, passing it the IDriver interface for your driver and the appropriate type. You can use the DriverHandler.RegisterDriver() function to perform this operation, but you should set the current driver to your driver for the target wrappers, like the methods found in the KS.Files namespace that call the current filesystem driver, using the SetDriver<T>() function.

Be sure to unregister your driver with the UnregisterDriver() function, or your driver will not get updated in the list of kernel drivers!