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With the Windows Drivers Model (WDM) for devices Microsoft implements an approach to kernel mode drivers that is unique to Windows operating systems. WDM implements a layered architecture for device drivers, and every device of a computer is served by a stack of drivers. However, every driver in that stack can chain isolate hardware-independent ...
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]
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.
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 is also responsible for initializing device drivers at bootup. Kernel mode drivers exist in three levels: highest level drivers, intermediate drivers and low-level drivers. Windows Driver Model (WDM) exists in the intermediate layer and was mainly designed to be binary and source compatible between Windows 98 and Windows 2000.
The upper part is accessible only from kernel mode, and with some exceptions, is instantiated just once, system-wide. ntoskrnl.exe is mapped into this region, as are several other kernel mode components. This region also contains data used by kernel mode code, such as the kernel mode heaps and the file system cache.
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.
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.