This week I’m taking some training by OSR on advanced driver development. I’ve been testing drivers since I started at Microsoft, but rarely from the kernel directy. As a result I have a fisheye’s view of the kernel that I hope to correct.

In the process of explaining how PnP works they showed off thier tool Device Tree, which is also distributed as part of the DDK. I couldn’t find a copy of the DDK for immediate download (although MSDN has a online copy of the docs), one could order it for just the shipping and handling. One of the cooler things about the recent DDK is that is comes with prefast, a nice tool finding some types of bugs in both drivers and normal code.

It was suprising to hear that people have trouble setting up a kernel debugger for windows kernel development. After noticing a prety good description of how to do it by Jolyon Wright, I feel I can only add two points and quick and dirty step-by-step guide. You can find the debugger on microsoft.com and the builtin “bootcfg” command line tool is a nice way to avoid the whole attrib thing when editing the boot.ini.

Here is the minimum setup:

1. Connect the two machines via a NULL modem cable. Notice which serial ports you plugged the cable into.
2. Choose a machine to be the debugger. Install the debuggers on this machine. Run windbg. Hit ctrl-k and put in the serial port you are using on that machine with a speed of 115200.
3. On the other machine the debugee, run bootcfg. Run something like this: BOOTCFG /Debug ON /PORT COM1 /BAUD 115200 /ID 2
4. Reboot the debugee and wait for debug spew to show up in windbg.
5. hit the break button in the debugger (ctrl-break). Type .symfix and hit enter. Wait for the symbols to load from the internet’s symbol server and hit g to allow the debugee to continue running.

BTW: This item is a test post, which might get picked up by the Microsoft Community page.