This chapter describes the impacts to driver writers when writing device drivers for OS/2 for SMP V2.11.
Existing device drivers should run on OS/2 for SMP V2.11 without modifications providing two simple rules are followed:
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OS/2 2.x device drivers were written with only 8259 architecture in mind. The code that is most commonly executed in a device driver is to send the End Of Interrupt (EOI) command to the 8259. There is a system interface for do this, however, for performance reasons some device drivers have decided to implement this function directly. Additionally, some device drivers may MASK or UNMASK interrupts or read the 8259 registers to determine the interrupt state.