The I/O Manager & The Process and Thread Manager

The I/O Manager

• Provides access to I/O devices through device drivers

• Main purpose of drivers is to implement a filesystem

• Supports other kinds of drivers (for keyboards, video cards, etc.) but they are really just filesystem drivers in disguise

• Creates an entry in the Driver directory for every driver

  • You can only list the contents of this directory if you are an admin

• Drivers are responsible for creating new Device objects using the IoCreateDevice API

• Unlike Linux and other operating systems, Windows does not implement core network protocols like TCP/IP using built-in system calls.

  • Windows uses the Ancillary Function Driver (AFD), which provides access to networking services for an application.

The Process and Thread Manager