Friday 12 July 2013

Basics of the Windows Driver Model

According to the Windows Driver Model, there are three different kinds of drivers, which will operate within the driver stacks etc. These types of drivers are: Bus Drivers; Filter Drivers and Function Drivers.

The bus drivers are typically already provided by Microsoft, they are as the name suggests, used to communicate with the various different buses on the motherboard, for instance the pci.sys for PCI/PCIe devices.

The function drivers, provide the operational side of things for the device, and is used to manipulate the device and it's operations. The driver will handle tasks, such as reads/writes and power management states for the device(s). 

The filter drivers are used to add greater functionality to a device, and are used to modify I/O requests and respond to other device driver responses, as an example from the Windows Internals book, they can be used to modify any mistakes made by the hardware regarding the amount of required resources.


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