Yet another interesting case lands on our doorstep thanks to NTDEV (original post here). I firmly believe that you have zero chance in diagnosing a non-trivial crash if you don’t understand the bugcheck code. The bugcheck code is, in fact, THE definitive reason for the crash. Of course, just understanding the bugcheck code itself is […]
WDK Problem Fixed, Plus Preview Access For All
[Last updated 24 October 2016, 11:00 Eastern time — Fix broken link] I wanted to update you on the status of a few issues in the world of the Windows Driver Kit, and also let you know about new options for early access to new versions of the WDK. Side-By-Side: Working Again You may recall that RS1, […]
C Is Not Reasonable
Those of you who’ve read my Pontifications over the years know that the things that annoy me are truly countless in number. But most of the things that annoy me do so because I simply cannot understand why they are the way they are. Take, for one example, how arithmetic is performed in C. Now, […]
Debugging Target RS1? Good Luck!
[Last updated 31 Aug 2016, 16:11 Eastern time] Update: As of 31 August 2016, we have verified that RS1 symbols are now present and indexed on the MSFT Symbol Server. Yay! We’re back in business! The hits to driver developers just keep on coming when it comes to RS1. The latest? The symbols for WDF01000.SYS and […]
Careful With Your WDK Updates!
I can never help myself when it comes to updating to the latest WDK. It’s always exciting to diff the old contents with the new and see what’s really going on in the operating system. And not since the XP DDK have I ever had a problem jumping on the bandwagon early (except that one […]
Careful With Your VS 2015 Updates!
[Last updated 3 Aug 2016, 11:05 Eastern time to clarify some wording] Yesterday was 2 August 2016 — Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607, build 14393) was released. As welcome as the Windows updates themselves are, they also come with updates to VS, the SDK, and the WDK. In the past 24 hours we’ve discovered that […]
WDK 14393 Code Analysis Enforces POOL_NX_OPTIN, Breaks POOL_NX_OPTIN
In an interesting twist, build 14393 of the WDK now enforces the use of NX non-paged pool: buffer = ExAllocatePoolWithTag(NonPagedPool, 4096, ‘ RSO’); nxoptinbreak.cpp(24): warning C30030: Warning: Allocating executable POOL_TYPE memory This is a good thing as it will force all of us lazy driver developers to finally embrace marking our allocations as NX. Now for the bad […]
Fix WDK Doc Issues — Yourself. And Fast!
If you use the WDK doc set all day, every day, you almost certainly have a few pet peeves — things in the docs that drive you nuts and that you’d like to change. Now, you make those changes yourself! Well, almost. In its latest move to open source, Microsoft has started putting all the WDK documentation on GitHub. No, […]
Driver Signing — More Details Emerge
Microsoft has just published a new Channel 9 Video that explains many of our long-standing questions about driver signing. The video was made during last month’s PlugFest that took place at MSFT. The basic policy is “New drivers must be signed by Microsoft” — This will be enforced starting in Windows Anniversary Edition (RS1) and Server […]
TH1, RS1, 1511, 14332 — Happy Anniversary?
If you’re having trouble following the lingo, code names, version numbers, and build numbers of the recent Windows releases you’re not alone. Our test lead recently asked me: “Redstone? Is that RS1? Is that Windows V.Next?” Yeah… who can remember, right? Because we keep forgetting, we thought you also might benefit from this little table. […]
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