Driver (software)

This article is about non hardware software drivers. For hardware device drivers, see Device driver.

A driver in software provides a programming interface to control and manage specific lower-level interfaces that are often linked to a specific type of hardware, or other low-level service. In the case of hardware, the specific subclass of drivers controlling physical or virtual hardware devices are known as device drivers.^[1]

Example

A client library for connecting to a database is often known as a driver, for example, the MySQL native driver for PHP.^[2]

References

1. "What is a driver?". Microsoft. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
2. "MySQL native driver for PHP - mysqlnd". MySQL. Retrieved 2 September 2018.