The present invention relates generally to operating system management, and more particularly to provisioning device drivers during deployment of an operating system.
The handling of device drivers during the deployment of an operating system (OS) is a delicate and critical process. Typically, each system device in the OS is treated as a single and unique entity, despite other devices that are discovered on the system. An agent component, executed on a machine being provisioned with device drivers, provides the capability to discover system devices that are present on a given machine by performing a system device inventory. The result of such discovery is a device list that identifies the devices interconnected to the local bus.
Based on the device list, a server component and the agent component are able to find a proper device driver to be used for each single device in the device list. Device drivers are sent one at a time for each single device in the device list.