Windows Driver Model - Criticism

Criticism

The Windows Driver Model, while a significant improvement over the VxD and Windows NT driver model used before it, has been criticised by driver software developers, most significantly for the following:

  • Interactions with power management events and plug and play are difficult. This leads to a variety of situations where Windows machines cannot go to sleep or wake up correctly due to bugs in driver code.
  • I/O cancellation is almost impossible to get right.
  • Thousands of lines of support code are required for every driver.
  • No support for writing pure user-mode drivers.

There were also a number of concerns about the quality of documentation and samples that Microsoft provided.

Because of these issues, Microsoft has released a new framework to replace WDM, called the Windows Driver Foundation, which includes Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF). Windows Vista supports both WDM and the newer Windows Driver Foundation. KMDF is also available for download for Windows XP and even Windows 2000, while UMDF is available for Windows XP and above.

Read more about this topic:  Windows Driver Model

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