Windows 98 Compatibility Notes

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Windows 98 incompletely implements many power management features. Consequently, the Windows 98 environment will forgive your mistakes more readily than Windows 2000 will, facilitating the initial development of a driver. But, since Windows 98 tolerates mistakes that Windows 2000 won't tolerate, you must be sure to test all of your driver's power functionality under Windows 2000.

The Importance of DO_POWER_PAGABLE

The DO_POWER_PAGABLE flag has additional and unexpected significance in Windows 98. Unless every device object, including the PDO and all filter devices, in your particular stack has this flag set, the I/O Manager tells the Windows 98 Configuration Manager that the device only supports the D0 power state and is incapable of waking the system. Thus, an additional consequence of not setting the DO_POWER_PAGABLE flag is that any idle notification request you make by calling PoRegisterDeviceForIdleDetection is effectively ignored—that is, you'll never receive a power IRP as a result of being idle too long. Another consequence is that your device's wake-up feature, if any, won't be used.

Requesting Device Power IRPs

Windows 98 appears to have a bug whereby PoRequestPowerIrp can appear to succeed—that is, it returns STATUS_PENDING—without actually causing you to receive a device set-power IRP. The problem arises when you ask for a set-power IRP that specifies the same device state that your device is already in—the Windows 98 Configuration Manager "knows" that there's no news to report by sending a configuration event to the configuration function that NTKERN operates on your behalf. Mind you, if you're waiting for a device IRP to complete, your device will simply stop responding at this point.

I used an obvious workaround to overcome this problem: if we're running under Windows 98 and detect that we're about to request a device power IRP for the same power state as the device already occupies, I simply pretend that the device IRP succeeded. In terms of the state transitions that HandlePowerEvent goes through, I jump from SendDeviceIrp directly to whatever action (SubPowerUpComplete or SubPowerDownComplete) is appropriate.

PoCallDriver

PoCallDriver just calls IoCallDriver in Windows 98. Consequently, it would be easy for you to make the mistake of using IoCallDriver to forward power IRPs. There is, however, an even worse problem in Windows 98.

The Windows 2000 version of PoCallDriver makes sure that it sends power IRPs to DO_POWER_PAGABLE drivers at PASSIVE_LEVEL and to INRUSH or nonpaged drivers at DISPATCH_LEVEL. I took advantage of that fact in GENERIC to forward power IRPs in situations where HandlePowerEvent is called at DISPATCH_LEVEL from an I/O completion routine. The Windows 98 version, since it's just IoCallDriver under a different name, doesn't switch IRQL. As it happens, all power IRPs in Windows 98 should be sent at PASSIVE_LEVEL. So I wrote a helper routine named SafePoCallDriver for use in GENERIC that queues an executive work item—refer to Chapter 9—to send the IRP at PASSIVE_LEVEL.

Other Differences

You should know about a few other differences between the way Windows 98 and Windows 2000 handle power management features. I'll describe them briefly and indicate how they might affect the development of your drivers.

When you call PoRegisterDeviceForIdleDetection, you must supply the address of the PDO rather than your own device object. That's because, internally, the system needs to find the address of the DEVNODE that the Windows 98 Configuration Manager works with, and that's accessible only from the PDO. You can also use the PDO as the argument in Windows 2000, so you might as well write your code that way in the first place.

The PoSetPowerState support routine is a no-operation in Windows 98. Furthermore, although it's documented as returning the previous device or system power state, the Windows 98 version returns whatever state argument you happen to supply. This is the new state rather than the old state—or maybe just a random number that occupies an uninitialized variable that you happened to use as an argument to the function: no one checks.

PoStartNextPowerIrp is a no-operation in Windows 98, so it would be easy for you to forget to call it if you do your development in Windows 98.

As best I can tell, the PO_POWER_NOOP flag in a device object doesn't do anything in Windows 98. Accordingly, there's no point in setting it in the hope of avoiding the need to handle power IRPs.

The service routines having to do with device power relations (PoRegisterDeviceNotify and PoCancelDeviceNotify ) are not defined in Windows 98. As far as I can tell, Windows 98 also doesn't issue a PowerRelations query to gather the information needed to support the callbacks in the first place. The service routines PoRegisterSystemState, PoSetSystemState, and PoUnregisterSystemState are also not implemented in Windows 98. To load a driver in Windows 98 that calls these or other undefined service functions, you'll need to supply a virtual device driver with stubs, as I'll describe in Appendix A, "Coping with Windows 98 Incompatibilities."



Programming the Microsoft Windows Driver Model
Programming the Microsoft Windows Driver Model
ISBN: 0735618038
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 93
Authors: Walter Oney

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