• Windows Driver File Type
• Windows Driver File Extension

Apr 20, 2017  Getting started with Windows drivers.; 2 minutes to read; In this article. Start here to learn fundamental concepts about drivers. You should already be familiar with the C programming language, and you should understand the ideas of function pointers, callback functions, and event handlers.If you are going to write a driver based on User-Mode Driver Framework 1.x, you should be.

Does anyone have any books/tutorials which may be useful in getting started in Windows device driver development?

For plain Win32/GUI development, Petzold's book seems to be the essential reference. Does such exist for drivers?

I would like to note that I'm not actually talking to hardware -- I actually want to emulate a piece of hardware in software, but I'd like to see how things work in general first.

Billy3

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5 Answers

One thing to beware of is the device driver development (architecture and tools) changes more than Win32 development ... so while Petzold's book from the 1990s is fine for Win32 and may be considered a timeless classic, the architecture for many kinds of drivers (printer drivers, network drivers, etc.) has varied in various O/S releases.

Here's a blog entry which reviews various books: Windows Device Drivers Book Reviews.

Don't forget the microsoft documentation included with the DDK: and, most importantly, the sample drivers (source code) included with the DDK. When I wanted to write a mock serial port driver, for example, I found the sample serial driver documentation combined with the DDK documentation was invaluable (and sufficient).

To learn kernel development well:

a. lots of samples kernel programs:

Windows DDK sample:

Windows Driver File Type

WDK samples:

Or just search:

(because above URL may change, but Google will likely to return u the most appropriate/reachable one)

b. lots of debugging techniques, and among which I found the best is VMware (or VirtualBox) + windbg + serial port debugging:

and this paper is classic for using VMWare + windbg (Lord of the Ring0):

c. as well as system admin tools which others have built:

(In the past called SysInternals built by Mark Russinovich, co-author of 'Windows Internal' - MUST READ!!)

from these tools u have will immense debugging options.

d. Join the OSR mailing list (ntdev especially is very active, but there are others like windbg):

e. Watch lots of video related to windows + kernel at channel9 (google returned over 1000 links):

f. Discussion forum like:

Subscribed to the free OSR magazine too (hardcopy). I have received mine since 1998 till now - and it is delivered half-way round the earth!

I would search for tutorials with rich examples, like this one. The essence in windows driver development is to get the picture about layers and IRPs, IRQLs, and also to know terms like filter drivers. If you are looking for example codes, here is my Spodek driver code: sf.net link. You will find there a filter driver (for keyboard, keyb.c), kernel space queue (queue.c) and techniques to hide presence in system. It's a legacy (sys) driver though.

You should probably use the quite recent Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) framework instead of the older WDM framework. A good starting point is reading the WDF Overview Word documents.

If you want to read a book, 'Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation' is the one you are looking for.

Personally the best way to start developing is by real-world exposure. Having this in mind I'd recomment this book

Windows Driver File Extension

It should be enough to get you started to have some code running which does 'something' then after you have the general picture you might dwell on topics such as - Difference between Buffered/Neither/Direct methods and the peculiarities associated with them.

'Programming the windows driver model, 2nd edition' is also a great help when you need details regarding some specific topics. But first I believe the most important thing is to put things into context and then build on that.

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Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF, formerly Windows Driver Foundation), is a set of Microsoft tools and libraries that aid in the creation of device drivers for Windows 2000 and later versions of Windows. It complements Windows Driver Model, abstracting away much of the boilerplate complexity in writing Windows drivers.

WDF consists of Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF). These individual frameworks provide a new object-oriented programming model for Windows driver development. The primary goals of WDF is conceptual scalability and reduced duplication, enabling developers to apply the same concepts across different driver types and reducing the code overhead required for drivers. This differs markedly from the Windows Driver Model (WDM) which requires driver developers to be fully familiar with many complex technical details to write a basic driver.

Part of the key to achieving conceptual scalability is that KMDF and UMDF use an 'opt-in' model. This model allows the developer to extend and override the default behavior of a canonical 'good driver'. In contrast, Windows Driver Model depends on the driver writer to implement all aspects of the driver's behavior.

Varieties[edit]

There are three types of WDF drivers:

• Kernel-Mode Driver Framework, for writing standard kernel-mode device drivers
• User-Mode Driver Framework v1, for writing user-mode drivers using a C++ COM-based API
• User-Mode Driver Framework v2, for writing user-mode drivers with syntactic parity to KMDF

WDF also includes a set of static verification tools for use by driver writers. These tools examine driver code for common errors and/or simulate the code of a driver in order to identify problems that are both difficult to detect and difficult to test for.

Versions[edit]

Bold 'Yes' means introduced with this version of Windows.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'Windows Driver Frameworks'. GitHub. Microsoft. Retrieved 15 February 2017.
2. ^'KMDF Version History'. Microsoft. 1 October 2018.
3. ^'UMDF Version History'. Microsoft. 1 October 2018.

External links[edit]

• Official website
• Developing Drivers with the Windows Driver Foundation by Orwick and Smith
• OSR Online, including many articles about WDF, KMDF, and Windows driver development
• Introducing Windows Driver Framework at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-01-25), written by well-known Windows driver developer, Walter Oney
• Building and deploying a basic WDF Kernel Mode Driver, CodeProject
• Developing a WDF USB Kernel Mode Driver for the OSR USB FX2, CodeProject