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The Linux framebuffer (fbdev) is a linux subsystem used to show graphics on a computer monitor, typically on the system console.
The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls. The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
In software engineering, a compatibility layer is an interface that allows binaries for a legacy or foreign system to run on a host system. This translates system calls for the foreign system into native system calls for the host system. With some libraries for the foreign system, this will often be sufficient to run foreign binaries on the host system. A hardware compatibility layer consists of tools that allow hardware emulation.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is a specification that defines the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting the computer hardware and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of firmware that implement the specification are AMI Aptio, Phoenix SecureCore, TianoCore EDK II, InsydeH2O. UEFI replaces the BIOS which was present in the boot ROM of all personal computers that are IBM PC compatible, although it can provide backwards compatibility with the BIOS using CSM booting. Intel developed the original Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification. Some of the EFI's practices and data formats mirror those of Microsoft Windows. In 2005, UEFI deprecated EFI 1.10.
The LinuxTV project is an informal group of volunteers who develop software regarding digital television for the Linux kernel-based operating systems. The community develops and maintains the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) driver subsystem which is part of the Linux kernel since version 2.6.x. The Linux kernel and the LinuxTV CVS include a fair number of drivers for commonly available PCI cards and USB devices, but the DVB subsystem core is also targeted towards set-top boxes which run some (embedded) Linux.
udev is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the /dev directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices are added into the system or removed from it, including firmware loading as required by certain devices.
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display. DRM was first developed as the kernel-space component of the X Server Direct Rendering Infrastructure, but since then it has been used by other graphic stack alternatives such as Wayland and standalone applications and libraries such as SDL2 and Kodi.
The Linux kernel provides multiple interfaces to user-space and kernel-mode code that are used for varying purposes and that have varying properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel:
- the "kernel–user space" API; and
- the "kernel internal" API.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Windows XP network device drivers on Linux operating systems. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs and dynamically linking Windows network drivers to this implementation. As a result, it only works on systems based on the instruction set architectures supported by Windows, namely IA-32 and x86-64.
Wireless network cards for computers require control software to make them function. This is a list of the status of some open-source drivers for 802.11 wireless network cards.
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
The USB video device class is a USB device class that describes devices capable of streaming video like webcams, digital camcorders, transcoders, analog video converters and still-image cameras.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a free and open-source virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20, which was released on February 5, 2007. KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extensions, such as Intel VT or AMD-V. KVM has also been ported to other operating systems such as FreeBSD and illumos in the form of loadable kernel modules.
libusb is a library that provides applications with access for controlling data transfer to and from USB devices on Unix and non-Unix systems, without the need for kernel-mode drivers.
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow an application program to interact with a device by using its device driver via standard input/output system calls. Using standard system calls simplifies many programming tasks, and leads to consistent user-space I/O mechanisms regardless of device features and functions.
Mode setting is a software operation that activates a display mode for a computer's display controller by using VESA BIOS Extensions or UEFI Graphics extensions.
Distributed Codec Engine (DCE) is an API and its implementation as software library ("libdce") by Texas Instruments. The library was released under the Revised BSD License and some additional terms.
References
- ↑ "An Introduction to the Video4Linux Framework: How to write a video capture driver". 2014-02-02. Retrieved 2014-02-16.
- ↑ "Overview of the V4L2 driver framework". Archived from the original on 2014-02-21. Retrieved 2013-12-04. Overview of the V4L2 driver framework.
- ↑ "Path to a Standardized Video Codec API" (PDF). Archived from the original on 2014-01-06.
- ↑ "gspca - LinuxTVWiki". LinuxTV . Retrieved 2024-01-12.
- ↑ Schimek, Michael H. "Video for Linux Two API Specification". LinuxTV . Retrieved 2024-01-12.
- ↑ "Open Broadcaster Software | OBS". obsproject.com.
- ↑ Corbet, Jonathan (2019-07-25). "Access to complex video devices with libcamera". LWN.net . Retrieved 2023-02-06.
