Kinds of Drivers
The term driver actually references a class containing a few different components. There are two broad classes of drivers, they are the following:
User mode drivers. These are subsystem-specific. An example would be Win32 VDDs for MS-DOS applications. User mode drivers are of little interest to you and are on their way out in terms of popularity and usefulness.
Kernel mode drivers. These are what you usually think of when talking about drivers. Kernel mode drivers, obviously, run in kernel mode as a privileged part of the operating system. From this point on, the discussion focuses on kernel mode drivers.
Within the broad classification of kernel mode drivers, there are again several types or layers. Figure 6.1 shows this graphically. ...
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