Driver Model

Driver Model

Purpose

This page describes the driver bring-up order and safety boundaries.

Contents

• Bring-Up Order
• QEMU Drivers
• Real Hardware Drivers
• DMA Safety

Bring-Up Order

Driver work starts with the devices needed for QEMU on macOS:

1. serial console;
2. UEFI handoff data;
3. PCI discovery;
4. VirtIO block;
5. VirtIO network;
6. ACPI table parsing;
7. NVMe;
8. Intel NICs;
9. server NICs;
10. ARM/NVIDIA platform devices.

QEMU Drivers

Serial comes first because it is the boot and panic visibility path. VirtIO block and VirtIO net follow because they unlock disk-backed boot and control-plane networking.

Real Hardware Drivers

Intel Desktop needs NVMe and PCIe NIC support. Intel Xeon needs NUMA-aware server NIC and multi-queue NVMe behavior. ARM/NVIDIA N1X-compatible systems need AArch64 boot, GIC, SMMU, and platform discovery.

DMA Safety

DMA must be protected by IOMMU or SMMU where available. Device ownership must match AI Cell and service permissions.

Related Pages

• QEMU on macOS
• Networking
• Security Model