Uncategorized

Windows Research Kernel @ HPI

Last Post

Hi folks,

with this very last article, I would like to inform you that this blog will be closed at the end of June. This decision was made for two reasons. (1) The Windows Research Kernel was a great step from Microsoft towards academia. Together with its license the WRK enabled universities to use the Windows source code for their teaching efforts. Unfortunately, there is no news about next versions of the WRK, which makes it hard to study and teach new trends in hardware design, such as multi-core architectures, hybrid systems, and memory hierarchies, in the context of the Windows operating system and to share those insights via this blog. (2) With the submission of my PhD thesis, my affiliation with the HPI will come to a close at the end of the year.

Nevertheless, we are going to maintain a static version of all the blog posts submitted so far.

Cheers,
Alex

What does SuspendThread really do?

Recently, I asked myself (and all people around me): When you invoke SuspendCall, will it really suspend the thread immediately, or might it continue to run for some time before it gets suspended? (The same question can be asked for TerminateThread, and, as we will see, it has a similar answer)
Read more

HowTo: Debugging the WRK in a Virtual Machine

At HPI we use the WRK for our operating systems courses. An essential part in our exercises is to extend and debug the WRK, which is why we prepared some slides for our students on how to configure a kernel debug session. Unfortunately the slides are in German. As Google's translation service quality is questionable in this regards, we briefly recap all necessary steps here.
Read more