The extended strategy routine entry point can be called at interrupt or task time. At interrupt time, the driver can work only with physical addresses or global virtual addresses; therefore, only physical and global virtual addresses, which reference structures that are physically contiguous in memory, are used in this interface. Physical addresses are used for data transfer areas. Global virtual addresses are used for request packets, control structures, and entry points.

Much of the performance gain realized in this interface is dependent on the asynchronous processing of requests. The performance gain realized is degraded considerably if the driver blocks in the strategy routine, forcing the request to be synchronous. Therefore, while it is not required that the driver never block, it is very strongly recommended if performance is of interest in the system for which the driver is targeted. Additionally, if the driver has set the does-not-block bit in the DD_DriverCaps field returned from the GET DRIVER CAPABILITIES command, then the driver absolutely must not block in any code path accessible by the extended strategy routine entry point. Furthermore, it must not call any DevHlp routine that could block, effectively limiting the DevHlps that can be called to only those permissible at interrupt time. Among the DevHlps that could block are Lock and Unlock, so all buffers passed through the extended entry points are guaranteed to be locked.

The extended strategy routine is used only to pass requests in Request List form (see Request Lists and Request Control). The physical device driver queues the requests passed, services the controller as necessary, sets status fields in the requests, and returns.