Programming
Atomic bit test and set
Drivers sometimes need to use atomic bit test and set operations in code. Drivers may be calling other functions that rely on bit testing and setting1 but more often than not calls are made to one of those InterlockedCompareExchangeXXX functions or the shorter InterlockedXXX functions if comparing current value is inessential.
x64 calling convention
Many of you are probably already familiar with the x64 calling convention1 2 in 64-bit Windows – where generally speaking first four parameters3 are passed in registers RCX, RDX, R8 and R9 with 32 bytes of spill area reserved
FltEnlistInTransaction behaviour
FltEnlistInTransaction is a filter manager function that file system mini-filters can use in Vista+ platforms to subscribe to relevant transaction notifications. It is declared in fltkernel.h as follows The idea is when a transaction is committed for example, mini-filter transaction callback is called
Memory dumping on Windows 7
It seems collecting memory dumps on Windows 7 has its own challenges. First things first – engineers always get the best information from a full memory dump but Windows 7 defaults dump type to Kernel Memory Dump. One of the first things to prepare machines for testing or development is changing the dump type to [...]
Computing on GPU – DirectCompute
A while back, I blogged about offloading computation traditionally done on CPU to GPU. Here is an excellent presentation from Chas Boyd at PDC 2009 about DirectCompute, which enables a DirectX 11 application to use GPU for computing tasks. The presentation not only gives an overview of a typical GPU, but also shows among other [...]
A tale of two asserts
There are two popular ways to assert in drivers. One can use the the regular ASSERT macro (int 3) or the relatively newer NT_ASSERT macro (int 2C). Since ASSERT calls RtlAssert, when the debugger breaks in, code would be several frames off of where the ASSERT was. If you use NT_ASSERT however, the debugger would [...]
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