Difference between board support package and device driver

[PPavan]

Hi,

Can someone let me know what is the difference between devicedriver and board support package ?

Thanks,
Pavan.

[dilbert]

The device driver is only a binary file with the ending *.ko (since kernel 2.6, kernel 2.4 and earlier had *.o). It is the link between a particular piece of hardware and your Linux kernel.

The board support package has many drivers and it installs the necessary drivers permanently on your computer.

[kingraja84]

hi,

Device driver is hardware activation software for a specific device,
bsp is software supporting the entire hardware present on your board,if ur having a data acquisition board with controller ,rtc,temperature sensor etc..
bsp will have drivers for rtc,controller port settings.....

freescale offers free bsp for their arm11 processor based controllers u download it and install to see what bsp contains

[rajainnov]

Kernel has two parts, one is Architecture-Independent code and the other is Arch-Dependent code.The later is called BSP.

/usr/src/linux-2.6.x/arch/arm/
/usr/src/linux-2.6.x/arch/arm/mach-versatile
The later is path for BSP of machine called versatile, this is a Real View reference board for ARM Processor.
Obviously this will have drivers for all the peripherals. But the code in this sub-dir has an architecture, it used some abstractions like machine (Data Struture is there for this Abstraction), these abstractions have some differences with Driver Abstractions, they constitute the desig part of BSP. The best resources for this subject are the kernel sources.

[matt_kleviar]

device drive : initializes devise, read/write from/into devise, interface for kernel to handle device in short.

BSP : initializes the whole board, brings it up getting all peripherals initaialised, and most importantly jumps to present boot loader, and of course also provides primitive set of drivers support such as disk drive etc..