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USENIX Windows NT Workshop, 1997
Creating User-Mode Device Drivers with a Proxy
Galen C. Hunt
Department of Computer Science
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
Abstract
Writing Windows NT device drivers can be a daunting task. Device drivers must be fully re-entrant, must use only
limited resources and must be created with special development environments. Executing device drivers in user-mode
offers significant coding advantages. User-mode device drivers have access to all user-mode libraries and applications.
They can be developed using standard development tools and debugged on a single machine. Using the Proxy Driver
to retrieve I/O requests from the kernel, user-mode drivers can export full device services to the kernel and
applications. User-mode device drivers offer enormous flexibility for emulating devices and experimenting with new
file systems. Experimental results show that in many cases, the overhead of moving to user-mode for processing I/O
can be masked by the inherent costs of accessing physical devices.
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