Block Driver Architecture (Windows CE 5.0)
Drivers for block devices generally expose the stream interface, and the block devices appear as ordinary disk drives. Applications access files on a block device through standard file APIs such as CreateFile and ReadFile.
The application calls the ReadFile function using a handle to a file that is stored on the block device.
The FAT file system for example, translates the read request to logical blocks. The FAT file system searches the buffer cache for the requested blocks. If these are not present, it issues an IOControl request to the corresponding block device driver to read bytes from the block device. Then, the block device driver receives the IOControl request, and then fulfills the request by accessing the block device through one of its low-level interfaces.
See Also
Block Drivers | File Systems | Block Driver Samples | Block Driver Registry Settings | Block Driver Manager | Block Device File Systems | File System Loading and Unloading | Block Driver Interface | Block Driver Loading | Block Driver Installation | Block Driver Detection | Block Driver Access | Block Driver Power Cycle
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