The Extended Device Driver interface supported in OS/2 2.1 is specifically targeted for service of hard disk devices. This interface can:
The Extended Device Driver interface employs a Request List of prioritized commands the driver can reorder to optimize disk access, subject to prioritization requirements. The requests can also be grouped by the kernel for notification callout from the device driver. In addition, READ and WRITE operations use scatter/gather descriptors, which allow for data transfer to and from discontiguous data buffers. The interface is used asynchronously, removing the need for blocking in the physical device driver or the physical device driver manager when the I/O request itself is asynchronous.
While the asynchronous, multi-request aspects of the interface contribute greatly to overall system performance on existing hardware, scatter and gather is specifically targeted for new classes of disk device hardware. This new class of devices supports transfer from disk to physically discontiguous memory space much more efficiently than alternative implementations.
The importance of this relative efficiency is amplified by the introduction of paging to the OS/2 operating system, where linearly contiguous memory normally maps to lists of discontiguous physical addresses. In addition, this interface is designed and optimized for server environments such as LAN Server 2.0, where file service paths are Ring 0 only and can execute at task or interrupt time. In such an environment, it must be possible to queue requests to the disk driver for service in the context of a network interrupt.
Extended physical disk device drivers refer to a superset of the standard OS/2 1.x physical disk device drivers. The term standard request is used to refer to the old style request packets format. The term extended request is used to refer to the new request packet format.