driverd

Driverd is a generic term for a daemon or service that coordinates the management of device drivers within an operating system. It is not a universally standardized component; different systems implement driver management with different names and architectures, but the common goal is to ensure that hardware devices are correctly recognized and that appropriate drivers are loaded and bound to devices.

Typical responsibilities include enumerating new hardware, selecting and loading compatible driver modules, binding drivers to devices, handling driver unloading when devices are removed, and applying driver updates or replacements. It may also manage dependencies between drivers, respond to hotplug events, and provide status information or logs to system administrators and other software.

Implementation varies: a driverd may run as a single process or as a set of cooperating daemons; it communicates with the kernel via a defined interface and may use user-space helpers or kernel facilities to load modules, access device information, or enforce policies such as driver signing and privilege separation.

Security considerations are central to driver management. To minimize risk from faulty or malicious drivers, systems often require signed drivers, restrict driver loading to privileged users, and sandbox or limit driver code execution.

In practice, some operating systems implement driver management with dedicated components (for example, device managers or kernel-mode drivers and user-space helpers) distinct from others, where driver management responsibilities are distributed among modules such as kernel subsystems, hotplug daemons, and package managers.

See also: device driver, daemon, hotplug, udev, modprobe, kernel, I/O Kit.