I wrote an article in the last issue of The NT Insider that described the whole “thing” about the Universal Driver model, and how it was more than just writing a driver that uses a (very common) subset of Driver Development Interfaces (DDIs). The bottom line is that writing a truly Universal Driver now necessarily […]
Hey Microsoft! We Want a Driver Developer Conference!
Update 11 November 2017: Voting is closed. The results are in! I like Shenzhen. Really, I do. It’s an exciting, vital, and fast-growing city. The food is phenomenal. But as much fun as Shenzhen is, it’s not exactly “next door” for most of the Windows Driver Development Community. If you’re in Western Europe, it’s more […]
Tracking an NTSTATUS to its Source
I found myself in a situation this week where I really wanted to call the API SeTokenIsAdmin. I vaguely remembered some issues around this API, and Googling quickly brought up a couple of threads from NTDEV and NTFSD hinting at a security issue that was fixed in 2015: https://www.osronline.com/ShowThread.cfm?link=201029 https://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=264871 (Yes, I was on one […]
Attestation Signing — It’s NOT a Mystery
All of a sudden, you can’t load your driver on 64-bit Windows. It works sometimes. But it won’t install or load when Secure Boot is enabled. You heard something about needing an EV Certificate… you got one… it doesn’t help. What do you do now? Over the past few weeks, we’ve been contacted by several […]
WinDbg, Debugger Objects, and JavaScript! Oh, My!
In case you’ve missed it, there are tons of changes going on under the covers in WinDbg. There is a fundamental paradigm shift going on in terms of how WinDbg grants access and presents data to the user and it can lead to some pretty cool results. Let’s take a concrete example of the old way […]
1394 Boot Debugging is Dead
TL;DR: Don’t waste your time like we did – 1394 boot debugging no longer works on the latest builds on Windows 10. As you might already be aware, native 1394 kernel debug support was pulled from the latest Windows 10 releases. An officially sanctioned workaround was provided by the kernel debugging team at Microsoft and we […]
Is Running the HLK Tests REALLY a Best Practice?
I can hear you now, scoffing as you read the latest issue of The NT Insider: “You OSR people actually think running the HLK tests is a Best Practice? Seriously?” I know this is what you’re thinking, because we had this same “discussion” internally among members of the OSR engineering staff. It turns out that how […]
Visual Studio 2017 Released — Driver Devs: Stay Where You Are
Good News: Today Visual Studio (VS) 2017 was released to General Availability. You can download it here. Bad News: The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) doesn’t support this latest version of Visual Studio, so us driver devs are stuck on VS 2015 for our driver development. There’s really not that much to say about it, except […]
The NT Insider Breaks The Internet!!
Whenever we release a new issue of The NT Insider, it’s always a big day here at OSR. It’s the culmination of weeks of writing, editing, and proof-reading. We even plan for the release several days in advance, having folks test our links to make sure we get everything right. There are about 60K subscribers to The NT […]
Of Windows, Git, FUSE, and Moral Equivalence
It’s a known fact these days that Microsoft is feeling the Git love. As stated by Microsoft and reported by Ars Technica, the Windows operating system is even moving from its long lived centralized source control system to Git. Strange days indeed! However, in all of this there’s an interesting technical bit related to Windows file systems. As […]
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