In order to be more flexible in providing support for OEM machines, OS/2 Version 2.0 introduces a new class of device driver, a base device driver. A base device driver is one which is needed during the loading of the operating system. In order to identify and initiate the loading of base device drivers a new CONFIG.SYS statement BASEDEV is introduced. The BASEDEV statement is used to load support for disks, diskettes and printer devices.
Only the name of the base device driver is included on the BASEDEV statement as base device drivers are load during an early stage of OS/2 initialization and there is insufficient support available at this point to process a path. Base device drivers are installed in the root directory of the partition from which OS/2 is loaded or alternatively in the \OS2 directory in that partition.
The BASEDEV statement makes it possible to specify the device drivers required for system initialization. In previous releases of OS/2 this information was included as part of the system loader and this restricted the range of hardware that these releases could support.