Techniques are disclosed to provide I/O handling in generic USB drivers. More particularly, a generic USB device driver architecture is described which enables development through a user-mode USB library that accesses a generic kernel-mode driver. The architecture may be utilized to provide efficient development for I/O handling. In a described implementation, a method includes defining a data structure utilized to access a plugged-in device. A pipe policy of the data structure is defined and utilizing to access the plugged-in device through a plurality of routines provided by a generic user-mode library (e.g., a dynamic link library (DLL)). The generic user-mode library is communicatively coupled to a kernel-mode generic device driver. In another described implementation, a separate generic device driver is loaded for each plugged-in device or for each functionality supported by the device.