Newbie - starting out here...

[Mike Hingley]

Hi,

I was wandering if the collective had any advice and ideas for me :

I am planning to develop a driver for Windows - I aim to write a couple of
drivers - primarily I would like to develop a driver that would (to the
user) look like a standard Drive, but would enable me to interpret all
access to this 'device' and present my own data ( like a ram disk type
function)

The aim is to eventually extend this idea to provide access to a file system
stored on a small embedded system, via a transparent Serial link cable.

Now - I've been reading what I can and I've read and fairly well understood
Galen's idea of a Kernel Proxy / User Mode driver, and I think I've got a
firaly goode idea how I could use a file system watchdog to 'emulate' this
type of activity, however I am anxious to see if I am heading down the right
direction here.

I have the DDK, and reading through it I think i can extend one of the
existing classes - however I am drawn towards the idea of a user mode driver
as speed isn't too much of a reuqirement to start with.

Any ideas , comments, books to recommend would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

 

[Gary G. Little]

Just one comment --- I wouldn't.

The paper was published in 1997, pre-dating even WDM. Maybe I've been stuck
in an eddy of driver development, but until your query I have never seen
anything about kernel proxy's and user mode drivers, so I don't think any
major work has been done to progress the idea.

Secondly, I'm currently involved in a project that an early driver had this
"proxy" interface between a user mode element and a kernel mode element. It
broke down into 2 kernel device drivers with an emulator in user mode. The
"proxy" driver received IO packets from the interface driver and passed them
down to the user mode component that emulated the eventual hardware. While
it's nice to know there is an academic paper supporting that method, it was
a genuinely bastardized system, slower than molasses, a pain in the ass to
maintain, and dropped as soon as the hardware was stable enough to allow
properly written bus and interface drivers.