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 6, “Security,” in Part 1 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 ...

Get Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 2 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.