New Performance Tools for WDF Drivers in Windows 10

We are excited to announce the availability of an extension to the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) in Windows 10 to obtain new performance insights into your KMDF or UMDF driver. You can use this tool to obtain performance insights or troubleshoot performance issues in your WDF driver. When performance tracing for your driver is enabled, the framework will generate ETW events on behalf of your driver in the WDF I/O, PnP and power callback related paths. WPT includes the necessary support to process these events and display graphs and summary tables to interpret the data. For example you can use this to:

  • Examine the driver’s WDF I/O request completion rate and examine the corresponding sampled CPU utilization.
  • Compare a UMDF 2 driver against a similar KMDF driver and determine if UMDF meets your performance requirements.
  • Determine which instance of a given PnP or power related callback is taking a long time to complete. Then examine sampled CPU usage to understand why.
  • Check if your device is making power transitions in and out of the D0 power state more frequently or not as frequently as you'd expect.

Information about this feature and interpreting the data is available in the documentation here. More information about the performance toolkit and the performance analyzer is available here.

We'd love to hear your feedback!

- WDF Team.