Plugfest Day 2

Oh what a day. The discussion on Transactional NTFS was awesome. Can't talk about it of course, but there is some kewl stuff coming down the pipe.

Found an interesting problem in my security driver today, exposed thanks to the IOStress test that Microsoft has as part of the tests of the Winqual group. IOStress beats the hell out of the driver with insane tests that purposely cause the driver to go through as many code execution paths that it can... stuff you don't normally see with every day use or even testing of the driver.

The result? A Programming 101 bug that I missed. ALWAYS ENSURE YOUR FAILURE CODE PATH FOR FAILED MEMORY ALLOCATIONS ACTUALLY RECOVER!

I'm screaming because I know better. Of course, this little issue now shows me about a couple of other concerns I have, and tonight I went through the debugger to ensure I have enough info for tomorrow to do more aggressive tests. I expected that ExAllocatePoolWithTagPriority ALWAYS allocated the memory as expected. Not always the case. Don't know if this would even be seen to fail in a real world environment, but no matter. It should be fixed.

God am I happy that I came down to Microsoft to run these tests. Finding these things help to increase the quality of the product, which helps everyone out. From my customers to Microsoft. Less crashes means less BSOD, and that even makes Microsoft look better. Here is an interesting stat to walk away with. Of all the BSODs in the world on more recent Windows operating systems, 82% of the crashes are caused by 3rd party kernelmode drivers, NOT Microsoft product.

Makes sense why Microsoft throws these PlugFest sessions. It helps everyone out. I know its helping me! I even was assigned an Online Crash Analysis (OCA) team member so I can directly communicate with Microsoft about crashes reported to Microsoft. Thats pretty kewl. I will be sending them my symbols so that if a customer ever crashes, Microsoft will be able to quickly diagnose the issue and get me a bucket of the crash. Of course, you as the customer would have to agree to send the crash dump; ALWAYS hit "Send" please. You help us increase the quality of our products. :)