Tag Archives: device driver

OS/2 Sequence Driver

Introduction

Programmers often have a need for a unique identifier for various reasons. Sometimes people end up using databases for a simple reliable counter, when there’s no other need for a database.

This is overkill. There’s no need to depend on something like Postgres just because we need a simple counter. But implementing a reliable counter can be a daunting task. Particularly if there is more than one application using the same counter.

This is a service that could very well be implemented in the operating system. When uniqueness and perhaps order is all that’s required, it’s perfectly all right for application foo and bar to use the same counter. All it means, is that when foo requests a new value, the counter may have been incremented by bar.

We can call this a non-decreasing counter. For an individual application foo, the results could be 1, 2, and 5; when application bar has 3, 4 and 6.

Concept

Here we present a simple software driver that creates a device that can be opened and read like a regular file, but each read results in a new value from the counter. We shall call it dev$seq$ so that it will be unlikely to conflict with regular file names.

As a proof of concept this driver lacks certain features that are required in a real world application. First, it’s only 16 bits so it’ll wrap around at 65,535 and become zero. Second, there’s no way to save its value to the file system; it always starts at zero upon every reboot. Third, there’s no backup procedure that can be applied.

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