Developing Drivers with the Windows® Driver Foundation

Basic Kernel-Mode Programming

Kernel-mode programming is something every driver developer should be familiar with. However, some aspects of kernel-mode programming are quite different from user-mode programming. In addition, kernel-mode programming often requires you to do familiar things in a different and frequently much more careful way.

For example, when total memory usage exceeds physical memory, Windows writes excess memory pages to the hard drive, so that a virtual address no longer corresponds to a physical memory address. If a routine attempts to access one of these pages, it causes a page fault, which notifies Windows to reacquire the physical memory. User-mode applications and services are typically not affected by page faults, apart ...