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To perform useful functions, processes need access to the peripherals connected to the computer, which are controlled by the kernel through device drivers. A device driver is a computer program encapsulating, monitoring and controlling a hardware device (via its Hardware/Software Interface (HSI)) on behalf of the OS. It provides the operating ...
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 Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) model continues to allow development of kernel-mode device drivers but attempts to provide standard implementations of functions that are known to cause problems, including cancellation of I/O operations, power management, and plug-and-play device support.
The Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, hence device drivers are kernel components. To ease the burden of companies maintaining their (proprietary) device drivers outside of the main kernel tree, stable APIs for the device drivers have been repeatedly requested.
Kernel-Mode Driver Framework, for writing standard kernel-mode device drivers; User-Mode Driver Framework v1, for writing user-mode drivers using a C++ COM-based API; User-Mode Driver Framework v2, for writing user-mode drivers with syntactic parity to KMDF; WDF also includes a set of static verification tools for use by driver writers.
In Windows XP, drivers account for 85% of the reported failures. In the Linux kernel 2.4.1 device driver code accounts for about 70% of the code size. [2] The driver fault can crash the whole system as it is running in the kernel mode. These findings resulted in various methodologies and techniques for verification of device drivers.
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.
In computing, a loadable kernel module (LKM) is an object file that contains code to extend the running kernel, or so-called base kernel, of an operating system. LKMs are typically used to add support for new hardware (as device drivers ) and/or filesystems , or for adding system calls .