Windows Driver Model - Criticism

Criticism

The Windows Driver Model, while a significant improvement over the VxD and Windows NT driver model used before it, has been criticised by driver software developers, most significantly for the following:

  • Interactions with power management events and plug and play are difficult. This leads to a variety of situations where Windows machines cannot go to sleep or wake up correctly due to bugs in driver code.
  • I/O cancellation is almost impossible to get right.
  • Thousands of lines of support code are required for every driver.
  • No support for writing pure user-mode drivers.

There were also a number of concerns about the quality of documentation and samples that Microsoft provided.

Because of these issues, Microsoft has released a new framework to replace WDM, called the Windows Driver Foundation, which includes Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) and User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF). Windows Vista supports both WDM and the newer Windows Driver Foundation. KMDF is also available for download for Windows XP and even Windows 2000, while UMDF is available for Windows XP and above.

Read more about this topic:  Windows Driver Model

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    “A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
    —Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)

    “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
    —Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)