Making the transition to a full driver

Updated: April 19, 2023

Once the kernel is running and interrupts are enabled, the minidriver continues to be called when the interrupt that it's attached to is triggered. This action can continue for the lifetime of the system; in other words, the minidriver can behave like a tiny interrupt handler that's always active.

Usually the hardware needs more attention than the minidriver is set up to give it, so you'll want the minidriver to hand off to a full driver.

Here's the sequence of events for doing this: