Overview of Driver Technologies
For general information about developing drivers see Get started with drivers on Windows and Write your first driver.
The majority of the driver technology information is the same for all editions of Windows 10. When you must make special considerations for a particular edition of Windows, such as for Windows 10 Mobile, we explicitly called these out in each technology area.
Windows drivers
You can create a Windows Driver—a driver that uses a subset of the available interfaces—to run on all editions of Windows 10. Where possible, use a Windows Driver to enable deployment of your drivers on multiple devices. For more information about how to build, install, deploy, and debug a Windows Driver for Windows 10, see Get started developing Windows drivers and Deploying a Driver to a Test Computer.
Device drivers and Windows 10 for desktop computers
For information about the tools used to develop desktop drivers, see Driver Development Tools and Tools for Verifying Drivers. For information about deploying drivers to Windows 10 on a desktop, see Device and Driver Installation. For information about troubleshooting driver installation, see Troubleshooting Configuration of Driver Deployment, Testing and Debugging.
Driver technologies
- 3D print devices
- ACPI
- Audio
- Battery Drivers
- Biometric Drivers
- Bluetooth Drivers
- Component Firmware Update (CFU)
- Display, graphics, and compute accelerator drivers
- File system drivers
- Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) drivers
- GPIO drivers
- Hardware notifications
- HID Drivers
- IEEE Drivers
- Imaging device drivers
- Kernel-mode driver technology
- Mobile broadband
- Multifunction device drivers
- NetAdapterCx
- Network drivers
- NFC device drivers
- Parallel port drivers
- Partner application development
- PCI drivers
- PCMCIA drivers
- Point of Service device drivers
- Power management technologies
- Print device drivers
- SD card bus drivers
- Sensor drivers
- Serial port drivers
- Smartcard device drivers
- Simple Peripheral Bus (SPB) drivers
- Storage device drivers
- Storage Firmware Update (SFU)
- Streaming media device drivers
- Test Authoring and Execution Framework (TAEF)
- Universal Serial Bus (USB)
- Windows Device Testing Framework (WDTF)
- Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA)
- Windows portable device drivers