Driver development on Windows Dev Kit 2023

lstipakov

I got a Windows Dev Kit 2023 (Project Volterra arm64 device). I installed VS2022 and can do userspace development just fine, but not so much kernel development.

First I tried with the latest EWDK, which didn't work - compiler couldn't find WDK headers. I also noticed that CL.exe was used from "Hostx86" directory and "Hostarm64" was missing.
I thought that there EWDK doesn't yet support arm64 and tried with WDK/SDK and VS buildtools not from EWDK - there "Hostarm64" directory exists.

After installing WDK I was prompted to install VS addon for driver development and that failed. I looked at installation log and it seems that addon only supports VS for amd64:

29.11.2022 10.55.03 -   Supported Products : 
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -       Microsoft.VisualStudio.Community
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           Version : [17.0,18.0)
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           ProductArchitecture : amd64
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -       Microsoft.VisualStudio.Pro
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           Version : [17.0,18.0)
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           ProductArchitecture : amd64
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -       Microsoft.VisualStudio.Enterprise
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           Version : [17.0,18.0)
29.11.2022 10.55.03 -           ProductArchitecture : amd64

I thought that I could try to live without addon and just ran msbuild from VS command prompt from SDK. This also failed because it again couldn't find WDK headers.

I opened project with VS, checked include paths and noticed that DDK_INC_PATH macro is missing. Just for test I added env variable with that name and pointed it to the location of WDK headers
(c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.22621.0\km). This didn't help and I gave up.

Anybody succeeded in building drivers on arm64 machine? I know I can cross-compile for arm64 on amd64 and I have been doing it for a while, but I really like that Volterra device and would like to use it as my main development hardware.

Peter_Viscarola_(OSR)

Given that VS (natively) on Arm64 only became "official" earlier this month (V17.4), and no WDK has been released since then, I would guess that the WDK is not supported for natively building drivers on ARM.

lstipakov

@Peter_Viscarola_(OSR) said:
Given that VS (natively) on Arm64 only became "official" earlier this month (V17.4), and no WDK has been released since then, I would guess that the WDK is not supported for natively building drivers on ARM.

Heh, I wish Microsoft would have stated it clearly. It is somewhat ironic that the device name is "Windows Dev Kit 2023", but you cannot really do (driver) development on it.

Dejan_Maksimovic

Dev Kit != Drv Kit (Driver kit)

cupid

Istipakov,

I got the exact same problem as you. WDK.vsix keeps reporting an error, and I ended in the same conclusion that arm64 platform is not supported.
However, it keeps being possible to compile an arm64 driver.
I downloaded the EWDK, ran LaunchBuildEnv.cmd, then started VS 2022 from the prompt as described here : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/download-the-wdk
From that, I could recompile the WDK samples available here : https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-driver-samples
(edit : target arm64, to be more precise)

Unfortunately I could not create a new Driver type project from VS 2022, so I edited the project of a sample and built my own project file manually.

I hope this helps.