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1.1 Introduction to WinDriver

WinDriver is a development toolkit that dramatically simplifies the difficult task of creating device drivers and hardware access applications. WinDriver includes a wizard and code generation features that automatically detect your hardware and generate the driver to access it from your application. The driver and application you develop using WinDriver is source code compatible across all supported operating systems [1.7]. The driver is binary compatible across Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista. Bus architecture support includes PCI/PCMCIA/CardBus/ISA/EISA/CompactPCI/PCI Express (PCMCIA is supported only on Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista). WinDriver provides a complete solution for creating high-performance drivers.

Don't let the size of this manual fool you. WinDriver makes developing device drivers an easy task that takes hours instead of months. Most of this manual deals with the features that WinDriver offers to the advanced user. However, most developers will find that reading this chapter and glancing through the DriverWizard and function reference chapters is all they need to successfully write their driver.

WinDriver supports development for all PCI / PCMCIA / CardBus / ISA / EISA / CompactPCI / PCI Express chipsets. Enhanced support is offered for PLX, Altera, AMCC and Xilinx PCI chipsets, as outlined in Chapter 7 of the manual.

Chapter 10 explains how to tune your driver code to achieve optimal performance, with special emphasis on WinDriver's Kernel PlugIn feature. This feature allows the developer to write and debug the entire device driver in the user mode, and later drop performance critical portions of the code into kernel mode. In this way the driver achieves optimal kernel-mode performance, while the developer need not sacrifice the ease of user-mode development. For a detailed overview of the Kernel PlugIn, refer to Chapters 11 - 12.

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