Developing Drivers with the Windows® Driver Foundation

Self-Managed I/O

Although the I/O and Plug and Play support that is built into WDF is recommended for most drivers, some drivers have I/O operations that are not related to queued I/O requests, are not subject to power management, or must be synchronized with the activities of WDM drivers in the same device stack. For example, the Pcidrv sample uses self-managed I/O callbacks to start and stop a watchdog timer. Similarly, a driver might be required to communicate with its device or another driver at a particular point during the device’s startup or shutdown sequence. WDF provides self-managed I/O to accommodate such requirements.

The self-managed I/O callbacks correspond more closely to the underlying WDM Plug and Play and power management IRPs ...