Patent ID: 7613862

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a storage component of a computer system to store a driver for a device on the computer system, the computer system further having a processor and a storage medium coupled with the processor via a bus; and a protocol handler in communication with the storage component, the protocol handler to determine whether the device belongs to a specific vendor and is compatible with a particular operating system, and enable automatic download of the driver to a storage subsystem of a computer system in response to the device belonging to the specific vendor and compatible with the particular operating system, determine whether the device is identified as belonging to a specific class of devices and is compatible with the particular operating system if the device belonging to the specific vendor is not detected, and enable automatic download of the driver belonging to the specific class and the particular operating system, the specific class including a new device class corresponding to a new device having a new standard interface number and being analogous to device class interfaces associated with existing devices classes, the device to receive a command, and upon receiving the command, the device to search for a matching driver and to respond with a driver package size, wherein the driver package size is set to zero if the matching driver is not found, and determine whether an operating system has an embedded driver compatible with the particular operation system if the driver belonging to the specific vendor and class is not detected, and enable automatic download of the embedded driver.