A Hole In My Head

These tools are essential for any driver writer and the folks who work on them are just down the hall from me. PFD is your normal PreFast with additional rules about kernel functions. SDV (static driver verifier) is a completely different tool which simulates...

First, it was great to meet some of you who are reading my blog in person. It's always nice to have faces behind the names. For those of you attended WinHEC, what did you think? Did you learn some interesting things or was it a waste of time or somewhere...

Certain devices are exclusive access, or in simpler terms, only one handle can be opened for a particular device. A serial port is an example of an exclusive device; it would make no sense for 2 applications to have the port open because each would expect...

One of the features I like about kd is that since you are using a console window, you get a lot of the console functionality for free. The 2 features that I really like are tab (err, F8) completion and the listing of command history (F7). On the other...

Title says it all. You are more then invited to come find me and chat. I will be at the 2 day time (Wednesday and Thursday) ask the experts sessions as well as the KMDF lab which is running Wednesday morning. Other then that, I will be around WinHEC but...

In addition to the standard KMDFDV behavior, you can enable further verification on handles by their type. By enabling per handle type verification, you get a history of handle references/dereferences and tag tracking on those references. The KMDF...

When you turn on the KMDF verifier(KMDFDV), a whole slew of behaviors are verified. Unlike the WDM driver verifier (DV) which allows you to select which behaviors to verify, KMDFDV is nearly an all or nothing affair. Future versions of KMDFDV will...

One of the prominant design goals throughout KMDF's development cycle was to create a system that had a built in and deeply integrated verifier from the start. Furthermore, we had a goal to create a system that was easier to verify (as compared to...

A few people have emailed me over the past few days how they can see the contents of the KMDF v1.1 ISO (or any other ISO for that matter) without having to burn it to a disc or telling me about the virtual CD tool on http://www.microsoft.com . I am sure...

Windows 2000 support for everyone who asked: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/wdf/KMDF_pkg.mspx If you have already installed KMDF v1.0 on your machine, you will be asked to remove the v1.0 bits before the v1.1 bits will install. This is by...

One of the, errr, joys of owning the PnP state machine in KMDF is that I must be compatible with all the weird and wonderful behaviors of not only drivers, but the PnP manager itself. One such behavior was just fixed for the next release of KMDF (post...

I think everyone at some point in time wants to embed a break point in there code, whether it be for debugging purposes, path tracing, or detecting edge conditions that have not yet been tested. When I hit a break point, I would prefer that the debugger...

It's a quick one today. One of the great features about windbg is that it has a return to caller button . I tend to like to keep my hands on the keyboard even when I am using windbg and Shift+F11 is still too cumbersome (long live the home row!). In the...

/FASTDETECT is a command line flag in a boot.ini entry. It started showing up in Windows 2000 (W2K) by default. Why does this flag exist? Previous to W2K ntdetect.com performed a tremendous amount of device detection since PnP did not exist previous...

I'm still getting back into the flow of things at work, so I will start off this week with a simpler topic and move into meatier topics as get more control over my time. One thing I am constantly asked is "how do I manually test PnP state changes in my...

I am back at work. Things are a bit out of order having been gone for a month, but hopefully I will be able to write something tonight once things have quieted down. Needless to say, staying at home with my new son has been an amazing experience. It was...