Architecture Overview
With this brief overview of the design goals and packaging of Windows, let's take a look at the key system components that make up its architecture. A simplified version of this architecture is shown in Figure 2-1. Keep in mind that this diagram is basic—it doesn't show everything. (For example, the networking components and the various types of device driver layering are not shown.)
Figure 2-1. Simplified Windows architecture
In Figure 2-1, first notice the line dividing the user-mode and kernel-mode parts of the Windows operating system. The boxes above the line represent user-mode processes, and the components below the line ...
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