Calling KMDF “new technology” is idiotic, it has been in use over 10 years. A heck of a lot of the non-Microsoft samples out there would have to do a major rewrite to work up to the level you could call them crap.
Yes Microsoft and others need to produce more KMDF samples. The last Driver Developer Conference had a presentation on how great KMDF was in the storage stack, but we never got a sample (yes I and others have done them commercially but we cannot give those out). I keep thinking about writing some samples as I phase into retirement, but the demand for drivers is strong enough that retirement is phasing in very slowly.
We need to work to replace a number of the Microsoft samples that are still WDM.
Don Burn
Windows Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2018 9:34 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Help Stamp Out Sensless WDM Usage
On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 7:04 AM, xxxxx@osr.com mailto:xxxxx > wrote:
>
>
> Folks… including and especially Microsoft folks,
>
> One of the common threads in this list is newbs writing WDM drivers. They ask us questions they get some answers. They go away. Their device drivers and especially filters live on as one of the more common causes of end user system crashes in modern times.
>
> We need a concerted effort to stomp out the senseless writing of WDM drivers.
>
> We need to scrub the samples to make sure there are no WDM drivers around (other than software only ?kernel services?). If you host example on GitHub or someplace else, if it?s a WDM driver , for heavens sakes make the readme say it?s a deprecated model.
>
> We need the WDK docs to very clear say, everywhere, that people should
> be using WDM as a last resort only if they are not writing a file system or a kernel service. Shit, put it on every WDM doc page: IoXxxx, KeXxxx, etc.
>
> WDK doc folks… please take some time to focus on this goal. It?ll be time we?ll spent.
>
> People who mistakenly start with a WDM sample are not well served. They would be better off with no sample… though I doubt they would see this. Starting with some hideous shit from CodeProject, or an ancient sample from the WDK, is just an invitation to (a) frustrating the dev, (b) injecting bugs into kernel-mode.
>
> Whew, I feel better now.
>
> Peter
> OSR
> @OSRDrivers
>
People are doing this because there are very approachable non-MS curated examples. The official examples are, to put it bluntly, crap.
The WDM driver examples aren’t bad by any means. They closely mirror how drivers work on *nix OSes. If people should use the new APIs Microsoft should show they are just as capable and well supported.
Historically, adopting new MS technologies is a horrible business decision, unless you have millions of dollars to spend. MS is paid to write software, something most companies are not paid to do, even if software is an integral part of their business. Playing follow the leader can easily bankrupt a small to medium sized business.
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
Please don’t get me wrong - I understand tge value pf moving forward. But effectively I can’t. The WDK and EWDK are opaque and expect some workflow to ge followed that just isn’t well articulated.
Cheers,
R0b0t1
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