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In Windows Vista, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) does not support two different display adapters. When using two display adapters, both must use the same WDDM driver. Although Windows Vista still supports XPDM drivers, a WDDM driver is required for the Windows Aero user experience. [54] [55]
Previously, the WDK was known as the Driver Development Kit (DDK) [4] and supported Windows Driver Model (WDM) development. It got its current name when Microsoft released Windows Vista and added the following previously separated tools to the kit: Installable File System Kit (IFS Kit), Driver Test Manager (DTM), though DTM was later renamed and removed from WDK again.
All 32-bit editions of Windows Vista, excluding Starter, support up to 4 GB of RAM. The 64-bit edition of Home Basic supports 8 GB of RAM, Home Premium supports 16 GB, and Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate support 128 GB of RAM. [19] All 64-bit versions of Microsoft operating systems impose a 16 TB limit on address space.
Kernel-mode drivers on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista must be digitally signed; even administrators will not be able to install unsigned kernel-mode drivers. [20] A boot-time option is available to disable this check for a single session of Windows. 64-bit user-mode drivers are not required to be digitally signed.
As a result, the decision was made to postpone the introduction of UEFI support to Windows; support for UEFI on 64-bit platforms was postponed until Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 and 32-bit UEFI will not be supported, as Microsoft does not expect many such systems to be built as the market moves to 64-bit processors.
The 64-bit versions of Vista require that all new Kernel-Mode device drivers be digitally signed, so that the creator of the driver can be identified. [77] [78] This is also on par with one of the primary goals of Vista to move code out of kernel-mode into user-mode drivers, with another example bing the new Windows Display Driver Model. [79]
Common device driver compatibility issues include: a 32-bit device driver is required for a 32-bit Windows operating system, and a 64-bit device driver is required for a 64-bit Windows operating system. 64-bit device drivers must be signed by Microsoft, because they run in kernel mode and have unrestricted access to the computer hardware. For ...
For security reasons, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista allow only signed drivers to be installed in kernel mode. [1] [2] Because code executing in kernel mode enjoys wide privileges on the system, the signing requirement aims to ensure that only code with a known origin executes at this level.