Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

I/O System Components

The design goals for the Windows I/O system are to provide an abstraction of devices, both hardware (physical) and software (virtual or logical), to applications with the following features:

• Uniform security and naming across devices to protect shareable resources. (See Chapter 8 for a description of the Windows security model.)

• High performance asynchronous packet-based I/O to allow for the implementation of scalable applications.

• Services that allow drivers to be written in a high-level language and easily ported between different machine architectures.

• Layering and extensibility to allow for the addition of drivers that transparently modify the behavior of other drivers or devices, without requiring any changes to the driver ...