The kernel stack is nonpaged memory for local variables^[7]. There is not room for huge data structures on the kernel stack because it is only 8KB-12KB long.

Drivers need to be reentrant, so they can be called simultaneously on different processors. The use of global variables is, therefore, strongly discouraged. However, you might read in some registry settings into globals, as they are effectively constant for all the code. Local static variables should also not normally be used for the same reason.

Finally, you can reduce your driver's memory usage in other ways. Once the driver initialization routines have completed, they will not be needed again, so they can be discarded. Similarly, some routines may be put into a pageable code segment. However, routines running at DISPATCH_LEVEL or above need to be in nonpageable nondiscardable memory.