A Hole In My Head

Yeah! The book is now back in print (see Amazon )

Looks like the going price on Amazon is >$250 :(. The good news is that you can still get the book as an e-book at O'Reilly, http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735623743/ , or at Safari, for around $50. Not as convenient as a hard copy IMHO, but it is...

This post is the third in a series.  You can see the others here, Part 1 and Part 2 . What is an Arbiter? In the NT PnP subsystem, an arbiter is an interface that a bus driver can expose which is able to intelligently assign PnP resources of a single...

Arbitration and Translation, Part 2 Building on yesterday’s post , I’m going to try to explain how Windows copes with machines with strange resource translations. I’ll use two examples in this post, one related to I/O port resources and one related...

A while back Jake Oshins answered a question on NTDEV about bus arbitration and afterwards I asked him if he could write a couple of posts about it for the blog. Here is part 1. History Lesson In the history of computing, most machines weren...

A refresh of the WDK is now available on connect. You can download the v7.1 WDK following the directions on WHDC .  The change list for the WDK can be found here , I copying it here as well: WDK Version 7.1.0 Changes and Issues This section contains...

Jake Oshins wanted to write about IRQLs and I am gladly letting him use my blog as a platform. Here it is… I’ve found myself explaining IRQL a lot lately, sometimes to people who want to know because they’re trying to write Windows drivers and sometimes...

In my last post I described why a WDFREQUEST is unique to a particular WDFDEVICE.  There is one particular programming pattern where this is not the behavior you want.  This pattern is when you have each PDO accepting IO requests which it then...

FYI: this is a bit of a long post, but I wanted to be thorough and illustrative and give some insight into how the framework works and potential design that could have been made, but were not for the sake of simplicity and performance A common misconception...

[This is a repeat of a post I made to NTDEV, but I wanted to make sure I reached as many people as possible.] I just read this deck, http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/E/6/5E66B27B-988B-4F50-AF3A-C2FF1E62180F/CON-T615_WH08.pptx , which was...

This has got to be one of the top FAQs out there: how do I set up a kernel debugger? I just stumbled across a link on MSDN which gives instructions not only on how to set up a kernel debugger on all transports (serial, 1394, usb2), but also how to set...

So, I have not written anything in over 6 months and yet I have posted on NTDEV and public newsgroups. What gives? Well, the short answer is that I have been short on time these past few months. I have had only enough extra curricular time to read NTDEV...

Let's say that you allocated a PIRP and sent it down your device stack. You free the PIRP in the completion routine and then return STATUS_MORE_PROCESSING_REQUIRED. To make life more fun, you decide that you want to be able to cancel the sent IRP after...

I was going to write about how to do this, but the awesome folks at WHDC got to it before I did.  I did get to review it before it was published, so I did have some influence in what is in the tip ;). So on this one my job is easy, just go read the...

After a long wait (thank you for your patience!), the WDF 1.7 coinstallers are now up on the connect site. To get the bits go to http://connect.microsoft.com Log in using your passport account Navigate to the WDF page (I don't know where it...

This is a pretty cool and somewhat obscure debugger command.  It allows you to tell the debugger what functions to skip if you are using the trace command ('t').  I think of the trace command as the 'step into' command though, but that is just...

One of the WDM escapes in KMDF is EvtDeviceWdmIrpPreprocess (or EvtDevicePreprocessWdmIrp in the API in which you register it) which you can register for by calling WdfDeviceInitAssignWdmIrpPreprocessCallback .  This function allows you to process...

Well, that is certainly a long title ;). First, let us look at an approximate implementation of KeAcquireSpinLock and KeRaiseIrql (and yes I know that KeRaiseIrql is really a #define to KfRaiseIrql, but it is the same thing that happens in the end...

I have no idea who created the name for PNP_DEVICE_NOT_DISABLEABLE, but I probably have the same reaction as you ... "seriously? that is what they named?" I mean come on, I think it could have at least been named PNP_DEVICE_CANNOT_BE_DISABLED. I am sure...

One interesting quirk about the PNP_DEVICE_NOT_DISABLEABLE state is that once it has been set and the PnP manager has processed it, the state is sticky.  By sticky I mean that even if you attempt to clear this bit on a subsequent IRP_MN_QUERY_PNP_DEVICE_STATE...

One thing that is easily overlooked about implementing DriverEntry is that upon return !NT_SUCCESS, DriverUnload is not called. I mentioned this anecdotally in a previous post , but it is worth expanding on. I was bit by this oversight when I was working...

During my sophomore year at Cal Poly , I decided that I wanted to learn about threads, synchronization techniques and other topics associated modern operating systems. Windows 95 had made its debut (yes, it is not a modern OS, but I didn't know that at...

A bit over a year ago I had to figure out why my Mail key started behaving differently on Vista vs XP and wrote about how I fixed it.  Well, my dev box was so slow that I was able to employ enough sympathy that I got a new one.  While my old...

I saw a book, Advanced Windows Debugging , in the Microsoft company store and quickly read through it. It looked pretty awesome in the level of detail and breadth that it covered. I ordered my own copy and I think it would be an invaluable resource for...

There is a hotfix for setupapi.dll, read the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937187 and see if it applies to your machine