Work Items and Driver Threads
Although a KMDF driver can create a new thread by calling PsCreateSystemThread, drivers rarely do so. Switching thread context is a relatively time-consuming operation that can degrade driver performance if it occurs often. Therefore, drivers should create dedicated threads only to perform continually repeated or long-term activities, such as polling a device or managing multiple data streams, as a network driver might do.
To perform a short-term, finite task, a driver should not create its own thread. Instead, it can temporarily “borrow” a system thread by queuing a work item. The system maintains a pool of dedicated threads that all drivers share. When a driver queues a work item, the system dispatches it to one ...
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