Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Architecture Overview

With this brief overview of the design goals and packaging of Windows, let’s take a look at the key system components that make up its architecture. A simplified version of this architecture is shown in Figure 2-1. Keep in mind that this diagram is basic—it doesn’t show everything. (For example, the networking components and the various types of device driver layering are not shown.)

Figure 2-1. Simplified Windows architecture

In Figure 2-1, first notice the line dividing the user-mode and kernel-mode parts of the Windows operating system. The boxes above the line represent user-mode processes, and the components below the line ...