PlugFest 4

As the week starts to come to a close, I am sure happy I got this opportunity to work with Microsoft. When I left the lab this evening, my driver had been banged against the IO Stress tests for 4 hours without skipping a beat. Thats right, I fixed the deadlock issue that was causing issues on the multiproc boxes in the lab.

I really like the stress tests Microsoft wrote. They push the limits of the driver in a way to follow every code execution path that it can interrogate. Thats really kewl. Whats even cooler was that I talked to the guys at Microsoft, and they are going to let me take it back to my lab. 2.5 gigs of testing sweetness to add to our development process. I already figured out how to add it too. I will have nant check out and build the latest driver Friday nights, and then run IO Stress for 48 hours on the weekend, fully interrogating the most recent codebase, reporting back to the build system and finally push out the results to the developer rss feed.

Tomorrow is the last day. It will be sad to leave the lab and access to the Microsoft team and other companies that we are interoping with, but at the same time exciting to get home to family. As I look back I see that I significantly increased the quality of our driver, learned some new techniques for driver debugging (and how to use more in WinDbg) and gained access to better tests. Not bad for a week of work.