The Driver Loader is how the Edge Agent talks to a heterogeneous fleet of hardware. Different devices speak different buses — Modbus, OPC-UA, a vendor serial protocol — so each is handled by a driver plugin. The loader discovers those plugins, starts them, and keeps them alive.
Why drivers are plugins
The set of device types in the field changes far more often than the agent core. Keeping drivers as separately loadable plugins (some written in C and wrapped with a thin Rust shim) means a new sensor family can ship without rebuilding the agent.
A driver that crashes or hangs must never take the whole agent down. Each driver runs under a supervisor that restarts it with backoff and reports its health upstream.
Budget enforcement
A misbehaving driver is capped, not trusted. If a plugin exceeds its
resource budget repeatedly it is moved to Disabled and an alert is raised
rather than allowed to starve telemetry collection.