Bringing Hardware Driving Muscle to Kylix

KylixDriver is a RAD Kylix-oriented and integrated software for PC hardware access. At the current stage of development this toolkit can be efficiently used for writing Linux device drivers for PCI specific and various general hardware.

The development of this product did not pursue a particular goal regarding its future utilization. Providing a direct hardware access from application software in multitasking operating system was always a demanding problem. Its successful resolution in terms of development of necessary programming tools will allow software developers to solve a broad range of non-trivial system tasks in their current and future projects.

We attempted to create this toolkit especially for Kylix programmers and to make our modest contribution to the Kylix Programmers Community. This driver featuring suite has the functionalities documented in the subsequent chapters and in standalone HTML manuals. We would hope that a separate class of programmers would be formed from the general group of software writers, who would probably use this tool for simple system functions in their applied projects. We would be very happy if for this particular class of developers of user-mode drivers among Kylix programmers the KylixDriver would become that dramatic simplification of a very complex problem of writing driver utilities for actual hardware, just as well known products of this type are for other programmers. As for us, we study the Linux internals and we also do Kylix programming. Actually, we would like to turn this product into a serious framework for Linux driver development with applied interface, recognizing that most of the work is still ahead. We also sincerely hope that the final touches to this project will be put in place coincidently with the Linux OS being established as the everyday user system (desktop system, not just the server system). During that time, the Linux will attract completely different programming tools, both system and applied, including their combination.