WinDBG commands, on the other hand, look like RS232 line noise. Often resulted in “hey, what does THAT do?” moments that led to revelations. Letter, it showed you the commands that started with that letter. The biggest advantage of SoftICE was discoverability. Modes, and write directly to the video memory. Respectively (color or mono), it was easy for SoftIce to simply change The old VGA and Mono adapters mapped memory to b8000, and b0000 SoftIce to use the monochrome display as the debug terminal. In my setups, I alwaysĪdded a secondary monochrome video adapter to my system, and directed Tried to create a replacement, but it was junk. I cut my teeth with SoftIce on DOS, and used it all > To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at > MONTHLY seminars on crash dump analysis, WDF, Windows internals and > Tim Roberts, Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. > just so we could run SoftICE on the mono monitor. We kept a monochrome graphics card around for years, > I was writing display drivers at the time, where this technique was not > grabbing a pointer to the primary surface and drawing directly. > Later, they could do any board that supported DirectDraw, again by > pounding directly into the kernel mapping of the frame buffer. > would essentially snapshot the frame buffer, then do their own drawing, by > graphics cards – cards where they had their own internal drivers. SoftICE only worked in one-screen mode on certain > directly on the video hardware behind the back of whatever video driver was > a ‘window’ in the sense of a Windows GDI window, but rather pounded > In the case of softice, IIRC as stop the world debugger, it did not create > On Jan 7, 2017, at 8:11 PM, Marion Bond wrote: This made it extremely responsive and fast. Mono), it was easy for SoftIce to simply change modes, and write directly Mono adapters mapped memory to b8000, and b0000 respectively (color or Use the monochrome display as the debug terminal. Secondary monochrome video adapter to my system, and directed SoftIce to An Asian vendor tried toĬreate a replacement, but it was junk. I cut my teeth with SoftIce on DOS, and used it all the way To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http: MONTHLY seminars on crash dump analysis, WDF, Windows internals and software drivers! How softICE internally manage it’s window?Ĭan we drawing window using device driver? SoftICE had interesting technology,ut manually freeze system and drawing a window over whatever currently displayed on screen. To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List mailto:xxxxx The advent of simple virtualization has obsoleted the motivation for such a technology IMHO This obviously dangerous technique was deemed appropriate for a debugger designed to run on the system being debugged. In the case of softice, IIRC as stop the world debugger, it did not create a ?window? in the sense of a Windows GDI window, but rather pounded directly on the video hardware behind the back of whatever video driver was running.

The long answer starts with, yes, as code running in KM a driver can do anything including many things that are not supported and will certainly crash the system. The short answer is no ? drivers do not create or manage windows.

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