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

An Overview of Intermediate Drivers

Before moving into the intricacies of the implementation of intermediate drivers, a few definitions are in order. This section also explores some of the trade-offs inherent in using a hierarchical driver architecture.

Intermediate Drivers Defined

For the purposes of this chapter, an intermediate driver is any kernel-mode driver that issues I/O requests to another driver. Intermediate drivers are often not responsible for any direct, register-level manipulation of hardware resources. Instead, they depend on a lower-level device driver, such as the physical driver, to perform hardware operations. In fact, intermediate drivers can assume a wide variety of forms.

The term "intermediate driver" is so generic that ...