A Bare PC Mass Storage USB Driver

Today’s device drivers are dependent on a given operating system, kernel, or an embedded system platform that provides a higher level of abstraction for its use. We present a USB mass storage device driver that does not depend on any operating system, or kernel, or embedded application. The device driver runs on a bare PC and directly interfaces with an application written in C/C++. The application programmer controls and manages all driver facilities. We describe a step-by-step approach to design the driver and provide code snippets of its key elements that can be used to build a device driver that runs on a bare PC, or a similar computing device. The bare PC API can be used to build a file management system that is independent of standard file system specifications. A bare device driver inherently provides simplicity, total control, flexibility, portability, platform independence, and better performance compared to a standard device driver. The performance measurements for read and write operations show a performance gain over a Linux system with significant improvements in stress tests. The experiments suggest that large transfers are optimized for groups consisting of a particular number of sectors. Bare device drivers can be used for building bare applications or as a foundation for building other types of USB drivers that can run directly on a variety of devices with no system support.