The Role of the Registry for Legacy Drivers

In recent history, it was common for hardware to remain dormant until software somehow magically became aware of its existence and began to stimulate it. The techniques used by drivers and the NT operating system fell into one of three categories:

  • A driver would maintain a list of potential hardware resources (i.e., port address, DMA channels, and interrupt levels) for each device that it might encounter. By probing each potential resource during DriverEntry, a driver would create an appropriate Device object (IoCreateDevice).

  • A driver would rely upon an installation program to specify (either by probing or by user specification) the resources and devices that the driver would manage. This list of devices ...

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