Chapter 3

Microsoft Windows 2000 provides several base mechanisms that kernel-mode components such as the executive, the kernel, and device drivers use. This chapter explains the following system mechanisms and describes how they are used:

• Trap dispatching, including interrupts, deferred procedure calls (DPCs), asynchronous procedure calls (APCs), exception dispatching, and system service dispatching
• The executive object manager
• Synchronization, including spinlocks, kernel dispatcher objects, and how waits are implemented
• System worker threads
• Miscellaneous mechanisms such as Windows 2000 global flags
• Local procedure calls (LPCs)