Canceling I/O Requests

A device's in-progress I/O operation (such as a request to read several blocks from a disk) can be canceled by an application, the system, or a driver. If a device's I/O operation is canceled, the I/O manager attempts to cancel all unprocessed I/O requests that are associated with the I/O operation. The device's drivers can register to be notified when the I/O manager attempts to cancel I/O requests, and the drivers can cancel the requests that they own by completing them with a completion status of STATUS_CANCELLED.

The framework handles some of the cancellation work for framework-based drivers. If a device's I/O operation is canceled, the framework completes the following I/O requests (with a completion status of STATUS_CANCELLED) that are associated with the canceled operation:

  • Undelivered I/O requests that the framework has placed in the driver's default I/O queue.

  • Undelivered I/O requests that the framework has forwarded to another queue because the driver called WdfDeviceConfigureRequestDispatching.

Because the framework cancels these requests, it does not deliver them to the driver.

After the framework has delivered an I/O request to the driver, the driver owns the request and the framework cannot cancel it. At this point, only the driver can cancel the I/O request, but the framework must notify the driver that a request should be canceled. Drivers receive this notification by providing an EvtRequestCancel callback function.

Sometimes a driver receives an I/O request from an I/O queue but, instead of processing the request, the driver requeues the request to the same or another I/O queue for later processing. Examples of this situation include the following:

In these cases, the framework can cancel the I/O request because the request is in an I/O queue. However, if the driver has registered an EvtIoCanceledOnQueue callback function for the I/O queue in which the request resides, the framework calls the callback function, instead of canceling the request, when the associated I/O operation is being canceled. If the framework calls the driver's EvtIoCanceledOnQueue callback function, the driver must complete the request.

In summary, when an I/O operation is canceled, the framework always cancels all associated I/O requests that were never delivered to the driver. If the driver receives a request and then requeues it, the framework will cancel the request (if the request is in the queue) unless the driver provides an EvtIoCanceledOnQueue callback function for the I/O queue.

Calling WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx

A driver can call WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx to register an EvtRequestCancel callback function. If the driver has called WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx, and if the I/O operation associated with the request is canceled, the framework calls the driver's EvtRequestCancel callback function so the driver can cancel the I/O request.

A driver should call WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx if it will own a request for a relatively long time. For example, a driver might have to wait for a device to respond, or it might wait for lower drivers to complete a set of requests that the driver created when it received a single request.

If a driver does not call WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx, or if a driver calls WdfRequestUnmarkCancelable after calling WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx, the driver is not aware of the cancellation and therefore handles the request as it normally would.

Calling WdfRequestIsCanceled

If a driver has not called WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx to register an EvtRequestCancel callback function, it can call WdfRequestIsCanceled to determine if the I/O manager has attempted to cancel an I/O request. If WdfRequestIsCanceled returns TRUE and the driver owns the request, the driver should cancel the request. If the driver does not own the request, it should not call WdfRequestIsCanceled.

A driver that has not called WdfRequestMarkCancelable or WdfRequestMarkCancelableEx might call WdfRequestIsCanceled in the following circumstances:

Canceling the Request

Canceling an I/O request might involve any of the following:

  • Stopping an in-progress I/O operation.

  • Not forwarding the request to an I/O target.

  • Calling WdfRequestCancelSentRequest to attempt to cancel a request that the driver had previously submitted to an I/O target.

If a driver is canceling an I/O request for a request object that the driver received from the framework, the driver must always complete the request by calling WdfRequestComplete, WdfRequestCompleteWithInformation, or WdfRequestCompleteWithPriorityBoost, with a Status parameter of STATUS_CANCELLED. (If the driver called WdfRequestCreate to create a request object, the driver calls WdfObjectDelete instead of completing the request.)

Synchronizing Cancellation

For information about synchronizing code that cancels I/O requests, see: