Expert Answer
Anonymous
To support the goal of making Windows OS the more stable it was important to reduce crashes due to driver and hardware issues. There are two types of drivers kernel mode and user mode. A fault in the kernel mode driver freezes the OS but a fault in User mode driver doesn't. My task was to convince all the teams that owned kernel mode drivers to migrate them to user mode. We identified 90 different candidates and developed a plan to convince them to migrate. This involved providing a clear how to migrate documentation, automated tools and test cases for migration, we also updated the user mode driver framework so its interface exactly matched kernel mode driver framework. In some cases, my team had to do significant portion of the migration for the candidate team. After we migrated some drivers, we shared the best practices and results with other teams to increase adoption. Over the span of 1 year we were able to get 30% of the drivers migrated to UMDF which greatly increased the OS stability and reduced memory requirements of the OS by 40 MB. To summarize, I successfully persuaded many teams to migrate to user mode driver by providing clear documentation, rationale for migration, test cases, automated tools and finally showcasing migration success stories in the organization through regular status updates.