Windows Driver Foundation Aims to Make Drivers More Reliable

To alleviate problems created by unreliable device drivers, Microsoft has announced a set of long-term goals, as well as steps it is taking with the next Windows client OS (code-named Longhorn), to transform the way Windows interacts with device drivers. The Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) seeks to simplify the task of creating device drivers and to insulate the OS from the effects of unreliable ones.

Driver Architecture Limits Reliability

Like most OSs, Windows offers a set of interfaces that hardware developers can use to get new devices to work with the OS. In the case of Windows, the set of interfaces is known as the Windows Driver Model (WDM.) When measured by the vast number of Windows-compatible hardware vendors and devices on the market, Microsoft has been quite successful, but the success has come at a price-data collected from Microsoft’s error-reporting systems indicate that device driver faults are a leading cause of OS crashes (known informally as “blue screens”). There are several reasons for the lack of reliable device drivers.