Windows display driver source code

Microsoft called this kind of driver "worrisome practice" on WinHEC Such a driver is extremely difficult to write and to maintain. That's why only 5 companies worldwide including ours managed to release larger volumes of such a driver into the market place. Development time for such a driver: Far more than ten man years.

Hardware needs to be faked e. First of all, it cannot perform well because DOD does not support graphics hardware acceleration. Second, other display software e. NVidia Control Panel does not behave well when it sees an unknown graphics adapter especially on laptops. There is no way to solve or circumvent this.

Many more pitfalls exist e. Power Management. There are currently only 2 companies who have such a driver out there in the market place for Windows 10 Desktop extension over network. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. Too technical. Jun 2, Nov 29, Apr 22, Sep 6, Changed wil nuget package linking to git submodule Jun 11, Sep 30, Aug 18, Ignore DB and opendb files.

Jan 22, Adding licensing file. Mar 19, Dec 11, Allow space in folder name. Oct 3, View code. Find out what's new in the WDK Universal Windows drivers Write one driver that runs on Windows 10 for desktop editions, as well as other Windows 10 editions that share a common set of interfaces.

WDF driver development guide Samples Use the samples in this repo to guide your Windows driver development. Build your first driver If you're writing your first driver, use these exercises to get started. Your display driver would then handle this in its DrvEscape routine. The difference is that DrawEscape allows you to provide a Window DC with your data and the clipping for that window will be provided to your driver.

This allows you to easily implement extended drawing commands which can behave correctly in the windowing environment as your driver will be informed of the proper clipping area. This is a concept originally created by SGI to help improve the performance of OpenGL on Windows by letting the vendor implement the graphics pipeline completely. When OpenGL The ICD is in full control of the graphics pipeline and thus each vendor and driver version may have a different implementation. The ICD kit is now maintained by Microsoft and it is not free if you wish to develop for it.

This method is not used by any driver vendor that I know of and is very slow which is the reason for the ICD implementation. This is through the DrvEnableDirectDraw interface. The user mode portion and some of the kernel for the DirectX graphics pipeline is implemented by Microsoft supplied system components.

The API will simply return back a list of callback interfaces the DirectDraw layer in the kernel will use to perform specific actions in the hardware. The supplied callbacks will be called several times to get the appropriate interfaces into the driver which implement the various features of Direct3D. This is described on MSDN. A mirror driver is a not well documented feature in which you can load a video driver that will "mirror" another display driver.

That is they will receive the same calls as the display driver they are mirroring. A mirror driver is documented to not support DrvGetModes however if you do implement it the returned modes will be cached and you cannot dynamically change the modes. Although I have heard that implementing DrvGetModes can help with loading and unloading the display driver on mode switches I was unable to get this to work.

To load a mirror driver the registry key for this device needs to set the " Attach. You then set the mode you wish to switch to and call ChangeDisplaySettingsEx again on the mirror driver. The mirror driver does not properly unload at mode switch and generally if there are references to a drawing surface the driver will not unload.

You also need to set " Attach. ToDesktop " to 0 after you load the display driver. If you wish to immediately unload the mirror driver without a display change you simply need to follow the same steps as what loaded it. Set " Attach. You can then call " ChangeDisplaySettingsEx " again with no parameters to force unloading.

Although this seems to work again everything is done by referencing the display surface so if there are outstanding references to the display surface the driver will not be unloaded. ToDesktop " value after loading the mirror driver. The example driver in this article simply shares a memory mapped file between an application and the display driver. This is not efficient but it is just an example.

To install the example you will simply need to use the "Add New Hardware" wizard in the control panel. You must select "Hardware is already installed" and "Manually select hardware from a list". The following picture shows the list of devices for which you scroll down to the bottom and select "Add a new hardware device":. Then you simply want to select "Have Disk" and find the. INF file that is provided with this project. You will then need to scroll down this new list and find "Toby Opferman Sample Video Display" as shown in the following picture:.

You will see the following dialog when installing just select "Continue Anyway" unless you do not want to install the driver. The next thing you do is just enable the second monitor using the display settings and the third tab.

Run the application monitor program provided with this article and you will be shown the second monitor in that application window:. Reading and seeing is a good way to learn however I believe you learn more if you actually try and do something! What I want you to do is take my example and add more display modes!