Chapter 3. System Mechanisms

Microsoft Windows provides several base mechanisms that kernel-mode components such as the executive, the kernel, and device drivers use. This chapter explains the following system mechanisms and describes how they are used:

  • Trap dispatching, including interrupts, deferred procedure calls (DPCs), asynchronous procedure calls (APCs), exception dispatching, and system service dispatching

  • The executive object manager

  • Synchronization, including spinlocks, kernel dispatcher objects, and how waits are implemented

  • System worker threads

  • Miscellaneous mechanisms such as Windows global flags

  • Local procedure calls (LPCs)

  • Kernel Event Tracing

  • Wow64

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