What Is a Driver?
The Windows kernel is not designed to interact with devices by itself. It depends on device drivers to detect attached devices, mediate communication between the device and the Windows kernel, and expose the device’s capabilities to clients such as applications. Windows provides an abstract device support interface called a driver model. The job of driver developers is to provide an implementation of that interface to support the specific requirements of their device.
In more practical terms, the usual purpose of a driver is to handle communication between applications and a device. In many ways, drivers operate much like services. For example, drivers:
Run in the background, separate from application processes, and can be accessed ...
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