OSR Developer's Blog

Welcome to the OSR Developer's technical blog. We've relocated the blog here from our OSR Online site to make room for renovations of that site.

This blog is an independent home for our developers to post technical items of interest to the community. It you enjoy it, you can follow our RSS feed from this URL.

Finding the Computer Name in a Crash Dump (2018 Edition)

22 June 2018

by SNoone

I was looking at a few different crashes today that were all eerily similar. In doing so, I realized that I hadn’t asked if these were all different systems or Read more

Beware MmBuildMdlForNonPagedPool and Kernel Stacks

20 June 2018

by SNoone

Well, this one took us by surprise… MmBuildMdlForNonPagedPool is the standard shortcut function drivers use to build MDLs describing non-pageable memory. Despite the name, the buffer described by the MDL Read more

“The Lists” Are Moving!

4 June 2018

by PeterGV

You’re probably aware that, for more than 20 years, OSR has supported and maintained a set of peer-support lists. During that time, NTDEV, NTFSD, and WINDBG have become the definitive Read more

What’s New in WDK 1803: Your Driver Has 552 Code Analysis Warnings

21 May 2018

by PeterGV

These days, each new upgrade for Windows brings with it a new Windows Driver Kit. And each new Windows Driver Kit brings with it new functions and features. Note that Read more

Beware of IoBuildDeviceIoControlRequest

14 February 2018

by SNoone

Diagnosed yet another crash today that is likely due to the usage of IoBuildDeviceIoControlRequest. Long ago I was burned by this API and vowed to never use it again, but Read more

Visual Studio 2017 Support for Spectre Mitigation

25 January 2018

by PeterGV

Just a quick note to make you aware that the version of Visual Studio 2017 that includes support for the /Qspectre switch, and the “__declspec(spectre(nomitigation))” decoration that can be used to Read more

Meltdown and Spectre: What about drivers?

23 January 2018

by SNoone

The week the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities was one of the most fun weeks I’ve had in a while. Not only were the vulnerabilities mind-bendingly clever, that week had just Read more

Guidance for Installing and Using WDK 1709 (aka 16299 aka RS3)

18 October 2017

by PeterGV

The newest WDK works with Visual Studio 2017! Let’s celebrate. But, it seems nothing is totally straight-forward anymore. Now that the new WDK is available, we thought we’d pass along Read more

Community Speaks Loudly and Clearly: We Want a Driver Conference!

18 October 2017

by PeterGV

There’s no point in keeping the polling open forever. We released the most recent issue of The NT Insider a week ago. In that issue, we asked the Windows Driver Read more

WDK 1709 (aka 16299 aka RS3) Released!

17 October 2017

by SNoone

Yet another release of Windows 10 means yet another release of the WDK: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/windows-driver-kit The big news with this release is that driver development is finally integrated with Visual Studio Read more