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Windows Device Driver Programming Series
A Windows Device Driver Primer (2/10): Device Driver Programming
Yashavant Kanetkar and Asang Dani
Writing a device driver for the Windows operating system is an entirely different discipline from traditional Windows application programming. A Windows device driver can be defined as "an extension to the operating system." This series of articles (ten in all) will provide you with a basic knowledge of device driver programming in a Windows environment and get you started developing your first device drivers.
Device Driver Programming
It is a common misconception that every Device Driver program controls some hardware device. There are many Device Driver programs that do not drive any device.
For example, a File System Driver (FSD) never interacts with any physical hardware.
- A FSD is responsible for handling file I/O requests from application, converting these requests to a low-level form (Cylinder, Head, Sector request) and passing it to another driver.
- This ‘another’ driver actually interacts with the physical storage device.
- File system drivers bear the responsibility of managing the logical organization of a disk.
- FSD is required for different types of file systems like FAT, NTFS, CDFS, UDF, etc.
