The SCSI subsystem uses a three layer design, with upper, mid, and low layers. Every operation involving the SCSI subsystem (such as reading a sector from a disk) uses one driver at each of the 3 levels: one upper layer driver, one lower layer driver, and the SCSI midlayer.

The SCSI upper layer provides the interface between userspace and the kernel, in the form of block and char device nodes for I/O and ioctl(). The SCSI lower layer contains drivers for specific hardware devices.

In between is the SCSI mid-layer, analogous to a network routing layer such as the IPv4 stack. The SCSI mid-layer routes a packet based data protocol between the upper layer's /dev nodes and the corresponding devices in the lower layer. It manages command queues, provides error handling and power management functions, and responds to ioctl() requests.