Design & Architecture

Measure twice. Cut once.

Great user experience comes from rock solid software, but achieving that goal is often difficult especially with code that is deeply tied into the rest of the system. Coding mistakes can sometime be "forgiven" in user-mode, but doing things wrong, even slightly, inside a device driver could easily bring down the entire system and is likely to cause data loss. Starting with a solid foundation could mean the difference between success and failure in the market. We have delivered numerous software products including solutions for WAN acceleration, web filtering, malware protection and VPNs that have been successfully deployed on tens of thousands of machines worldwide.

Developers thrive on turning technical ideas into a working implementation, but creating a product that scales well, is easily deployed, supported, and extended requires a well thought out design. If your product is not performing as well as you'd like and you want to start fresh with a solid base, we can bring vital experience to the process. Reliability, supportability, extensibility and performance will get top priority. With a solid foundation in place, implementation time, cost and risk are substantially reduced. We have done it before and are passionate about helping to bring great products to market. Get in touchand let's discuss how to achieve the same with your product.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does driver architecture consulting involve?

Driver architecture consulting involves working with a product team before significant code is written to make the fundamental design decisions that shape the product's reliability, performance, and maintainability. Typical deliverables include a choice of driver model and framework, a defined data path and I/O model, a concurrency and locking strategy, a plan for handling power management and PnP events, and an assessment of how the driver will interact with other software on the system. Getting these decisions right at the start is substantially less expensive than revisiting them after code is in production.

When should you hire a consultant for driver architecture?

The most valuable time to bring in a kernel-mode architecture consultant is early — before the team commits to a driver model or data-path design. This is especially true when the product is entering a new area of the kernel, such as a storage team building their first network driver or a security team adding a minifilter for the first time. Consultants also add value when a product is being ported to a new Windows version, when performance targets are not being met, or when a driver is experiencing intermittent crashes that suggest a structural design issue rather than a localized bug.

What are the key design decisions in Windows driver development?

The most consequential decisions are the choice of driver model (WDM, KMDF, or UMDF) and whether the driver should run in kernel mode at all; the I/O queuing strategy and how requests are dispatched across processors; the locking hierarchy and which data structures require synchronization; how the driver handles power state transitions and surprise removal; and how it will be tested and certified. Decisions about user-mode communication — IOCTLs, shared memory, ETW events — also have significant long-term maintenance implications.

How does driver architecture affect system stability and performance?

A poorly designed driver architecture introduces systemic problems that are very difficult to fix after the fact. An incorrect locking strategy causes deadlocks or data corruption that only surface under specific multi-processor workloads. Excessive use of non-paged pool memory puts pressure on a resource shared across all kernel components and can trigger system crashes under load. I/O serialization at the wrong point in the stack eliminates the concurrency needed for high-throughput storage or network operations. These are structural properties of the design, not bugs that a later code review can easily catch and fix.

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