Driver Model

Driver Model

Purpose

This page describes the driver bring-up order and safety boundaries.

Contents

• Bring-Up Order
• QEMU Drivers
• Real Hardware Drivers
• DMA Safety

Bring-Up Order

Driver work starts with the devices needed for QEMU on macOS:

1. serial console;
2. UEFI handoff data;
3. PCI discovery;
4. VirtIO block;
5. VirtIO network;
6. ACPI table parsing;
7. NVMe;
8. Intel NICs;
9. server NICs;
10. ARM/NVIDIA platform devices.

Driver Rollout Table

Phase	Required drivers	Acceptance test
QEMU boot	serial, UEFI handoff	deterministic boot log appears
QEMU storage	PCI, VirtIO block	read a known test block from image
QEMU network	VirtIO net	exchange ICMP or UDP test packet
Intel Desktop	NVMe, first PCIe NIC	boot from NVMe and run latency test
Intel Xeon	server NIC, MSI-X, multi-queue NVMe, IOMMU	queues are NUMA-local and protected
ARM/NVIDIA	AArch64 timer, GIC, SMMU, platform discovery	boot, route interrupts, protect DMA

QEMU Drivers

Serial comes first because it is the boot and panic visibility path. VirtIO block and VirtIO net follow because they unlock disk-backed boot and control-plane networking.

Real Hardware Drivers

Intel Desktop needs NVMe and PCIe NIC support. Intel Xeon needs NUMA-aware server NIC and multi-queue NVMe behavior. ARM/NVIDIA N1X-compatible systems need AArch64 boot, GIC, SMMU, and platform discovery.

DMA Safety

DMA must be protected by IOMMU or SMMU where available. Device ownership must match AI Cell and service permissions.

Drivers must fail closed when DMA protection cannot be configured for a device that can access AI Cell memory.

Related Pages

• QEMU on macOS
• Networking
• Security Model
• Open Decisions