Transmit and receive

In a driver, there’s a lot more than just C and hardware interaction. You also have to deal with:

Concurrency and Synchronization – Managing locks, spinlocks, atomic operations, and ensuring safe access to shared resources.

Memory Management – Allocating kernel memory safely, handling DMA buffers, and avoiding memory leaks or invalid accesses.

Interrupt Handling – Dealing with IRQs, deferring work using tasklets, workqueues, or bottom halves.

State Management – Handling suspend, resume, and power states efficiently.

Error Handling and Recovery – Ensuring robustness in the presence of hardware failures or unexpected states.

Device Trees and ACPI – Parsing platform configuration data.

Firmware Communication – Loading and interfacing with device firmware blobs.

Kernel APIs and Subsystems – Interacting with networking, block devices, input devices, and other kernel frameworks.

Performance Optimizations – Managing cache coherency, NUMA awareness, and latency-sensitive operations.

Security Considerations – Preventing privilege escalation, ensuring safe user-space interaction, and sandboxing where applicable.

Yes, interfacing with hardware often requires unsafe Rust or C, but a lot of driver logic isn’t directly interacting with raw hardware registers. Rust can help improve safety in many of these areas by reducing common C pitfalls like use-after-free, null dereferences, and buffer overflows.