A Hole In My Head

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...

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...

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...

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...