Technical Document #20

Technical Document #20
Can I run two different device drivers, both developed with WinDriver, on the same machine?

Yes. You can run several WinDriver-based applications simultaneously on the same machine. (With regard to accessing the same hardware from several applications, please refer to Technical Document #98.)

Since WinDriver is backwards compatible, code developed with an earlier version of WinDriver will run with the drivers from a newer version as well (provided you do not attempt to recompile the old code with the header files of the new version without a compatible license). (You may, however, need to update the INF files for PCI/USB devices, when upgrading the driver on a Plug-and-Play OS.)
The opposite, however, cannot be guaranteed — i.e., code developed with a newer version of WinDriver will not necessarily run with an older driver file. You should, therefore, take care, when distributing your driver, that the installation process does not overwrite a newer version of the WinDriver module (windrvr6.sys/.dll/.o/.ko / WinDriver.kext, or windrvr6.vxd / windrvr.sys/.vxd/.o — in previous versions) with an older version of the driver file. This is also true for the windrvr6_usb.o/.ko WinDriver USB Linux GPL driver (WinDriver v10.0.0 and above).

In version 6.0 of WinDriver we have modified the name of the WinDriver kernel module from windrvr to windrvr6. As a result, drivers developed with an earlier version of WinDriver (v5.2.2 and below), which use the windrvr.sys/.vxd/.o driver, can be used simultaneously, on the same PC, with drivers developed with version 6.0 and above of WinDriver, which use the windrvr6.sys/.vxd/.o/.ko driver.