windows 驱动程序如何与硬件通信？

Question

I am curious about the different ways windows drivers interact with the hardware. For example, some drivers might use a function, others a macro, and others might hard-code the register addresses directly into their code. There are probably other ways as well.

1. Can someone please let me know about the different ways of interaction.
2. Also, I would like to know, given a particular driver, How can we find out how is it interacting, if we have all the source files including the.vcxproj and other binaries. ?

Any help is really appreciated.

TIA. :-)

Answer 1

It depends on the type of device. for example, if it is a generic PCI Device then the access to the hardware is done "directly" to the HW, meaning Windows map the PCI MMIO to some virtual address and the driver interacts with it.

Microsoft recommended using HAL Function in order to prevent issues with compiler optimization, eg to use READ_REGISTER_UCHAR() macro to read BYTE from a device register.

USB, for example, is a subsystem that has a big stack and there is a USB controller that manages access to the device. so, in this case, you will need to use a function to access the device register.

You can find a lot of Microsoft driver samples in GitHub