Windows® 2000 Device Driver Book: A Guide for Programmers, Second Edition, The

The WMI Architecture

The WMI architecture consists of five layers:

• A source of WMI data (e.g., a device driver) designated the data provider

• A central repository of WMI data that implements a CIM-compliant data store, based on the CIM object model (CIMOM)

• A WMI provider (e.g., the WDM WMI provider) that provides the necessary linkage between a WMI data source and the data store

• A consumer (or client) of the WMI data

• A protocol (e.g., COM) that presents the data store to a consumer

The WMI provider for WDM consists of two parts:

• A user-mode Win32 DLL that provides linkage between a user-mode client

• A set of kernel-mode services that invoke and respond to driver code. An IRP, IRP_MJ_SYSTEM_CONTROL, is the mechanism by which these services make requests ...