Developing Drivers with the Windows® Driver Foundation

Common I/O Request Types

The fundamental issue in designing your driver to process I/O is to determine which request types the driver must handle, which request types it sends down the device stack, and which request types the framework can handle on the driver’s behalf.

The most common I/O requests that applications issue are create, close, read, write, and device I/O control.

Create Requests

An application typically opens a file, directory, or device by calling the Windows CreateFile function. If the request succeeds, the system returns a file handle through which the application can perform I/O. The file handle is specific to the process—not the thread—that created it. The application provides the file handle in all subsequent I/O requests to ...