Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Device drivers are designed for particular Windows operating system versions, and device drivers for a previous version of Windows may not work correctly or at all with other versions. Because many device drivers run in kernel mode installing drivers for a previous operating system version may destabilise the Windows operating system.
It complements Windows Driver Model, abstracting away much of the boilerplate complexity in writing Windows drivers. WDF consists of Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF). [2] These individual frameworks provide a new object-oriented programming model for Windows driver development.
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.
Although drivers for most hardware are contained in other files, commonly of file type .sys, a few core drivers are compiled into hal.dll. Kernel mode device drivers for devices on buses such as PCI and PCI Express directly call routines in the HAL to access I/O ports and registers of their devices. The drivers use HAL routines because ...
The Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) is a driver framework developed by Microsoft as a tool to aid driver developers create and maintain kernel mode device drivers for Windows 2000 [a] and later releases. It is one of the frameworks included in the Windows Driver Frameworks. [1]
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]
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]
Windows 10 includes WDDM 2.0, which is designed to dramatically reduce workload on the kernel-mode driver for GPUs that support virtual memory addressing, [37] to allow multithreading parallelism in the user-mode driver and result in lower CPU utilization.