A method is provided to overcome excess code development associated with developing device drivers that are hierarchically related and provides standardization to driver developers by listing in the private area of a device object types of file objects, including specific IRP handlers associated therewith, that may be created under that device object to thereby provide a device object context. In like manner, each file object has listed in the private area types of other file objects, again incl...

A method, computer program product, and data structure is provided overcome excess code development associated with developing device drivers that are hierarchically related and provides standardization to driver developers by listing in the private area of a device object types of file objects, including specific IRP handlers associated therewith, that may be created under that device object to thereby provide a device object context. In like manner, each file object has listed in the private a...

A method and system for communicating between operating systems using an interface that provides an abstraction layer of one of the operating systems. At least one channel is created that allows messages and data packets to be transferred between the operating systems without converting the data into an operating system's format before sending the data to another operating system. The interface provides commands for each of the operating systems to use to communicate with each other and provides...

A method and computer program product for overcoming the inefficiencies associated with inter-buffer data transfers between separate processing components such as kernel mode drivers that are chained together. Provided is a standard mechanism for allocating and managing data buffers needed for processing data in a system, wherein multiple drivers are chained together using a standardized connection method in the connection pin instances. Drivers having different buffer requirements and capabilit...

A method and computer program product for synchronizing processing between two or more data streams (e.g., video and sound input) and for rate matching between two different hardware clocks that may drift with respect to one another (e.g., an originating clock represented in a timestamped data stream versus a clock actually rendering the data) in a system of interconnected software drivers running in kernel mode. The present invention overcomes the coordination complexity and inaccuracies in the...

This invention involves user mode proxy of kernel mode operations in a computer operating system. The broad contours of the invention allow drivers operating in the kernel mode of an operating system to be proxied by a corresponding user mode object. A user mode process wishing to communicate with or manipulate the kernel mode driver may perform such communication or manipulation by communicating with or manipulating the corresponding user mode proxy. The present invention has particular applica...

A method and computer program product are presented that overcome the inefficiencies in user mode processing of multimedia data by allowing an application running as a user mode process simply to start and connect multiple blocks of kernel mode functionality in the form of drivers or filters (separate logical blocks of driver executable code). Once the kernel mode filters are set up and connected, the user mode application need not be active until notified by the filters. Such notification may o...

A method and computer program product for overcoming the inefficiencies associated with inter-buffer data transfers between separate processing components such as kernel mode drivers that are chained together. Provided is a standard mechanism for allocating and managing data buffers needed for processing data in a system, wherein multiple drivers are chained together using a standardized connection method in the connection pin instances. Drivers having different buffer requirements and capabilit...

Frame-based streaming data flows through a graph of multiple interconnected processing modules. The modules have a set of performance parameters whose values specify the sensitivity of each module to the selection of certain resources of a system. A user specifies overall goals for an actual graph for processing a given type of data for a particular purpose. A flow manager constructs the graph as a sequence of module interconnections required for processing the data, in response to the parameter...

Streaming data is processed through one or more pipes of connected modules including mixers and/or splitters. The data is carried in composite physically allocated frames having virtual subframes associated with different ones of the splitters, mixers, and other transform modules. Nesting trees and pipe control tables represent the structure of the pipes. A frame allocator is assigned to a particular module in a pipe. Rather than issuing a control transaction to all modules when any one of them ...