Chapter 6. Layered Drivers

 

If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person; he will find an easier way to do it.

 
 --HLADE’S LAW

Developers engineer clever solutions to avoid work. In fact, this laziness drives many innovations in code. The ability to layer drivers is one such innovation. Using layers, a developer can chain multiple drivers together. In this way, a developer can modify the behavior of an existing driver without coding a whole new driver from scratch.

Think about it: What if you want to encrypt the contents of a hard drive? Would you like to write an NTFS driver from scratch that supports not only the exact hardware of the drive mechanism, but also its NTFS protocol and encryption routines? Using layered drivers, this is not ...

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