Unlike most other Exec Device drivers, SANA-II drivers have no internal buffers. Instead, they read/write to/from an abstract data structure allocated by the driver user. The driver accesses these buffers only via functions that the driver user provides to the driver. The driver user must provide two functions--one copies data to the abstract data structure and one copies data from the abstract data structure. The driver user can therefore choose the data structure used for buffer management by both the driver and driver user in order to have efficient memory and CPU usage overall. The IOSana2Req contains a pointer to data and the length of said data. A driver is not allowed to make assumptions about how the data is stored. The driver cannot directly manipulate or examine the buffer in any manner. The driver can only access the buffer by calling the functions provided by the driver user. Before calling OpenDevice(), the driver user points ios2_BufferManagement to a list of tags (defined in <devices/sana2.h>) which include pointers to the buffer management functions required by the driver (defined below). The driver will fail to open if the driver user does not supply all of the required functions. If the device opens successfully, the driver sets ios2_BufferManagement to a value which this opener must use in all future calls to the driver. This "magic cookie" is used from then on to access these functions (a "magic cookie" is a value which one software entity passes to another but which is only meaningful to one of the software entities). The driver user may not use the "magic cookie" in any way--it is for the driver to do with as it wishes. The driver could in theory choose to just copy the tag list to driver-owned memory and then parse the list for every IORequest, but it is much more efficient for the driver to create some sort of table of functions and to point ios2_BufferManagement to that table. The specification currently includes only two tags for the OpenDevice() ios2_BufferManagement tag list: S2_CopyToBuff - This is a pointer to a function which conforms to the CopyToBuff Autodoc. S2_CopyFromBuff - This is a pointer to a function which conforms to the CopyFromBuff Autodoc.