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:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“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)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)