An Upward Compatible Ethernet Device Driver for Bare PC Applications

An upward compatible device driver is a driver that can be upgraded to work with future versions of the hardware with minimal changes. We consider upward compatibility of network interface controller (NIC) drivers for bare machine computing (BMC) applications that run without the support of any operating system (OS) or kernel. Specifically, we describe an approach for designing an upward compatible gigabit Ethernet Intel NIC device driver for BMC applications. Compared to similar Windows NIC drivers, the BMC driver has fewer external calls and a smaller binary executable. The same approach can be used to design and develop upward compatible BMC device drivers for NIC hardware with similar chip sets.