Writing a Reinitialize Routine

Any driver that needs to initialize itself in stages can contain a Reinitialize routine. A Reinitialize routine is called after the DriverEntry routine has returned control and other drivers have initialized themselves. Typically, the Reinitialize routine performs tasks that must be done after another driver starts.

For example, the system's keyboard class driver, kbdclass, supports both PnP and legacy keyboard ports. If a system includes one or more legacy ports that the PnP manager cannot detect, the keyboard class driver must nevertheless create a device object for each port and layer itself over lower-level drivers for the port. Consequently, the class driver has a Reinitialize routine to be called after its DriverEntry and AddDevice routines have been called and other drivers have been loaded. The Reinitialize routine detects the port, creates a device object for it, and layers the driver over other lower-level drivers for the device.

A driver's DriverEntry routine calls IoRegisterDriverReinitialization to queue a Reinitialize routine for execution. The Reinitialize routine can also call IoRegisterDriverReinitialization itself, which causes the routine to be requeued. One of the parameters to Reinitialize indicates the number of times it has been called.

The call to IoRegisterDriverReinitialization can include a pointer to driver-defined context data, which the system supplies as input to Reinitialize. If the Reinitialize routine uses the registry, the context data should include the RegistryPath pointer that was passed to the DriverEntry routine because this pointer is not an input parameter to the Reinitialize routine.

The Reinitialize routine will not be called if DriverEntry does not return STATUS_SUCCESS.

Usually, a driver with a Reinitialize routine is a higher-level driver that controls both PnP and legacy devices. In addition to creating device objects for the devices that the PnP manager detects (and for which the PnP manager calls the driver's AddDevice routine), the driver must also create device objects for legacy devices that the PnP manager does not enumerate. The Reinitialize routine creates those device objects and layers the driver over the next-lower driver for the underlying device.

If a driver has a Reinitialize routine, it initializes in the same basic steps described in Writing a DriverEntry Routine, and it also has the same basic requirements as its DriverEntry routine.