User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) is a device-driver development platform first introduced with
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
's
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
, and is also available for
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
. It facilitates the creation of drivers for certain classes of devices.
Programming Drivers for the UMDF
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Overview
Standard device drivers can be difficult to write because they must handle a very wide range of system and device states, particularly in a multithreaded software environment. Badly written device drivers can cause severe damage to a system (e.g., BSoD or data corruption) since all standard drivers have high privileges when accessing the kernel directly. The User-Mode Driver Framework insulates the kernel from the problems of direct driver access, instead providing a new class of driver with a dedicated application programming interface
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...
at the user level of interrupts and memory management. If an error occurs, the new framework allows for an immediate driver restart without impacting the system. This is particularly useful for devices that are intermittently connected to the system or support hot swapping
Hot swapping is the replacement or addition of components to a computer system without stopping, shutting down, or rebooting the system. Hot plugging describes only the addition of components to a running computer system. Components which ha ...
via a bus technology such as USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
or FireWire
IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony a ...
.
According to Microsoft, UMDF drivers are simpler to write and debug than kernel-mode drivers.Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...
version 10 on 2004-10-12. Code-named "Crescent", it was designed to support the Media Transfer Protocol driver, and no public interfaces or documentation were provided for it. Later, Microsoft decided to turn UMDF into a device driver development platform.
Version history
* User-Mode Driver Framework 1.5-1.9, supports Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
and newer.
* User-Mode Driver Framework 1.11, supports Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...
and later, and Windows Server 2008 and later.
Architecture
A UMDF Driver is a DLL based on Microsoft's Component Object Model
Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface technology for software components from Microsoft that enables using objects in a language-neutral way between different programming languages, programming contexts, processes and machines ...
(COM). However, UMDF does not use COM for loading, unloading, or controlling concurrency; it only uses COM as a programming pattern, for example exploiting COM's '' IUnknown'' interface. At startup, UMDF calls ''DllGetClassObject'' to get a pointer to an ''IClassFactory'' interface in the driver and then uses the ''CreateInstance'' method of the IClassFactory interface to create an instance of the driver callback object.
The driver object is an instance of the framework-provided ''IWDFDriver'' interface. The driver provides a set of callbacks via the ''IDriverEntry'' COM interface, which is the main entry point for driver customization.
See also
* Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF)
* Kernel-Mode Driver Framework
The Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) is a driver framework developed by Microsoft as a tool to aid driver developers create and maintain kernel mode device drivers for Windows 2000 and later releases. It is one of the frameworks included in ...
(KMDF)
References
External links
*
Peter Wieland's blog
– developer lead on the UMDF team at Microsoft
{{Microsoft FOSS
Device drivers
Free and open-source software
Microsoft application programming interfaces
Microsoft free software
Software using the MIT license
Windows-only free software