I/O Processing Sequence

It is important to understand the complete life cycle of an I/O request. This section describes the flow of a request—from user-mode code to I/O Manager to device driver.

An I/O request goes through several stages during its life.

  • Preprocessing by the I/O Manager

  • Preprocessing by the device driver

  • Device start and interrupt service

  • Postprocessing by the driver

  • Postprocessing by the I/O Manager

The following sections describe the stages in more detail.

Preprocessing by the I/O Manager

This phase performs device-independent preparation and verification of an I/O request.

  1. The Win32 subsystem converts the request into a native system service call. The system service dispatcher traps into kernel mode and into the I/O Manager. ...

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