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Showing posts with label Windows Device Drivers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows Device Drivers. Show all posts
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Basics
Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver
Device Driver
- an extension of OS
- a "bridge" between hardware and applications (and Operating Systems)
- abstracted into logical and physical layers (and hence can be categorized as Logical Device Drivers (LDD) and Physical Device Drivers (PDD))
- LDD written by OS vendors where as PDD written by device vendors
An attempt by Microsoft to reduce system instability due to poorly written device drivers by creating a new framework for driver development called "WINDOWS DRIVER FOUNDATION (WDF)".
WDF - includes UMDF (User Mode Driver Framework) and KMDF (Kernel Mode driver Framework)
1. UMDF - implements a message-based protocol for communicating with their devices - as user mode drivers.
- any malfunction on these drivers does not cause any system instability
2. KMDF - allows development of kernel-mode device drivers, but attempts 2 provide std implementations functions that are well known to cause probs, including cancellation of IO operations, power management, and PnP device support
Device Drivers on Windows, can run on *both Ring 0 and Ring 3*
Device Driver
- an extension of OS
- a "bridge" between hardware and applications (and Operating Systems)
- abstracted into logical and physical layers (and hence can be categorized as Logical Device Drivers (LDD) and Physical Device Drivers (PDD))
- LDD written by OS vendors where as PDD written by device vendors
An attempt by Microsoft to reduce system instability due to poorly written device drivers by creating a new framework for driver development called "WINDOWS DRIVER FOUNDATION (WDF)".
WDF - includes UMDF (User Mode Driver Framework) and KMDF (Kernel Mode driver Framework)
1. UMDF - implements a message-based protocol for communicating with their devices - as user mode drivers.
- any malfunction on these drivers does not cause any system instability
2. KMDF - allows development of kernel-mode device drivers, but attempts 2 provide std implementations functions that are well known to cause probs, including cancellation of IO operations, power management, and PnP device support
Device Drivers on Windows, can run on *both Ring 0 and Ring 3*
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