OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.

05/09/2024

Last Update: 9 May 2024 TL;DR Starting sometime with Windows 11 Microsoft changed Windows Driver Verifier to no longer bug check or breakpoint when it encounters most issues. Instead, it (silently) writes an entry to the system event log. This change was neither announced nor documented by Microsoft. So, in short, we've all been testing our drivers using Windows Driver Verifier on Windows 11 for years, expecting it to actively tell us if we've made serious mistakes....

Last Update: 9 May 2024 TL;DR Starting sometime with Windows 11 Microsoft changed Windows Driver Verifier to no longer bug check or breakpoint when it encounters most issues. Instead, it (silently)…

10/24/2022

Great! But did you know that even the "Driver Recommended" rule set leaves out a lot of useful tests? We are indeed extremely fortunate to have the tooling that is available to us for Windows driver development. Static tools such as Code Analysis (CA) and Static Driver Verifier (SDV), coupled with dynamic tools like Windows Driver Verifier and WDF Verifier make it much easier to avoid problems that aren't always evident during basic in-house testing....

Great! But did you know that even the “Driver Recommended” rule set leaves out a lot of useful tests? We are indeed extremely fortunate to have the tooling that is available to us for W…

09/21/2022

It took "a while" but, without any fanfare, sometime in May of 2022, Microsoft released a version of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) that supports Visual Studio (VS) 2022. This version is referred to as the Windows 11 Version 22H2 WDK. Support for VS 2022 is a good thing. Given that many (if not most) Windows driver developers these days often also write some sort of application code, having one tool chain that supports both jobs is both useful and most welcome....

It took “a while” but, without any fanfare, sometime in May of 2022, Microsoft released a version of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) that supports Visual Studio (VS) 2022. This version is …

05/12/2022

Times change. People, even engineers, eventually "clue up." As people become sensitive to the negative impact that the names of things can have on those who don't share their own ethnic, racial, cultural, or social background, they get on board with the idea of changing those names. Sometimes the changes are simple; As easy as replacing one troublesome term with an equally good neutral term....

Times change. People, even engineers, eventually “clue up.” As people become sensitive to the negative impact that the names of things can have on those who don’t share their own …

12/06/2021

OSR's 2022 Public Seminar Schedule (Q1/Q2) -

10/08/2021

Should I Set PnPLockdown=1?

What IS this INF directive, why is the WDK whining at me to provide is, and should I do as it suggests?

At some point recently (“recently” being defined as “in the last year or so”) the WDK started whining at me with the following warning: warning 1324: [Version] section shoul…

10/05/2021

Getting WinDbg to Work Over KDNet on a VM Hosted by QEMU-KVM

We spent several months working on a very intensive (and very interesting) project that required a writing a driver that was specifically intended to run on a Windows system running under QEMU-KVM …

04/15/2021

OSR's File System Minifilter and WDF Seminar Schedule -

04/08/2021

The results are in: Microsoft is definitely eliminating cross-signing, and won't be doing anything to facilitate our updating drivers on down-level versions of Windows. Score a loss for the driver development community.

For months, the team here at OSR has been actively working with folks at Microsoft to find a solution to allow drivers on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 systems, including Server 2012 R2, to…

01/21/2021

We were surprised by a Tweet claiming that simply accessing a path caused NTFS to report the volume as corrupt: We met this with great skepticism (how could that possibly be??) but seems to have a strange knack for finding these sorts of things. After a bit of delay the magic path was revealed and, as advertised, triggered a very ugly warning:...

We were surprised by a Tweet claiming that simply accessing a path caused NTFS to report the volume as corrupt: We met this with great skepticism (how could that possibly be??) but seems t…

01/07/2021

The Windows 2004 WDK/EWDK have been updated to mitigate the previously reported ExAllocatePoolZero Security Vulnerabilities. Read about what you should do now.

tl;dr The Windows V2004 WDK/EWDK had a serious security vulnerability. It has been updated to mitigate that vulnerability, and you should update all of your machines that have the WDK/EWDK installe…

11/16/2020

My article for The NT Insider on static analysis tools for driver developers included the following off-hand comment: We’re not going to discuss SDV in this article because (a) it provides a very different type of analysis from that provided by Code Analysis and Clang-Tidy, and (b) nobody at OSR has been able to get it to work – at all – in VS 2019....

My article for The NT Insider on static analysis tools for driver developers included the following off-hand comment: We’re not going to discuss SDV in this article because (a) it provides a very d…