I have a WDM driver that I personally built from NT 4.0 code base for W2K a few thousand years ago.
It’s a fairly vanilla, WDM PnP pcmcia device attached to PCI bus.
It was designed and realized to comply with to published WDM driver development guidelines circa 2000, including power management & wmi.
It was extensively tested, back in the day, with surprise removals etc. and has stood the test of time (up to XP SP3 – with just a single two-line fix, about ten years ago).
Assume (for now) that the XP DDK 32-bit binary and the .inf file are both reliable - if somewhat dated. My question is:
What chances does the community think I have of hosting this beast on Windows 7 (x86)?
I’m about to suck-it-and-see but it could take some time to organize and setup test equipment.
Meanwhile… what’s the buzz? Apart from driver signing, should I expect to encounter some new issues in this corner of the kernel domain?
I mean “new” as in mandatory requirements introduced since XP?
If I hit the jackpot and this just happens to work (stranger things have happened) will I be able to ‘post-sign’ a fully built binary driver with a
Window 7 vintage driver signing tool?
Or should I start planning to revisit and modernize the full build chain?
I have a WDM driver that I personally built from NT 4.0 code base for
W2K a few thousand years ago.
It’s a fairly vanilla, WDM PnP pcmcia device attached to PCI bus.
It was designed and realized to comply with to published WDM driver
development guidelines circa 2000, including power management & wmi.
It was extensively tested, back in the day, with surprise removals
etc. and has stood the test of time (up to XP SP3 – with just a single
two-line fix, about ten years ago).
Assume (for now) that the XP DDK 32-bit binary and the .inf file are
both reliable - if somewhat dated. My question is:
What chances does the community think I have of hosting this beast on
Windows 7 (x86)?
My bet is that the binary works without change.
Meanwhile… what’s the buzz? Apart from driver signing, should I expect
to encounter some /new/ issues in this corner of the kernel domain?
Not particularly. The Windows kernel has an admirable history of
backwards compatibility.
Driver signing is not an issue, either. The signing requirements for
Win 7 32-bit are the same as for XP. If you’re willing to live with the
“CAUTION! UNSIGNED DRIVER! PLAGUE AHEAD!” dialog, you don’t need to
sign it at all.
If I hit the jackpot and this just happens to work (stranger things
have happened) will I be able to ‘post-sign’ a fully built /binary
driver/ with a
Window 7 vintage driver signing tool?
If you want, you can create a new CAT file and sign it. That changes
the “CAUTION!” warning to a “Do you trust this publisher?” warning. You
can do that with a modern “signtool”.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>It was extensively tested, back in the day, with surprise removals etc.
If you was really careful with testing and avoiding violations of the documentation and doing undocumented things - then the chances are very high, just plain huge.
Dev Home wrote:
>
>
> have a WDM driver that I personally built from NT 4.0 code base for
> W2K a few thousand years ago.
>
>
>
> It’s a fairly vanilla, WDM PnP pcmcia device attached to PCI bus.
>
>
>
> It was designed and realized to comply with to published WDM driver
> development guidelines circa 2000, including power management & wmi.
>
> It was extensively tested, back in the day, with surprise removals
> etc. and has stood the test of time (up to XP SP3 – with just a single
> two-line fix, about ten years ago).
>
>
>
> Assume (for now) that the XP DDK 32-bit binary and the .inf file are
> both reliable - if somewhat dated. My question is:
>
>
>
> What chances does the community think I have of hosting this beast on
> Windows 7 (x86)?
>
My bet is that the binary works without change.
If this old NT4-style driver calls HalAssignSlotResources() - binary will not work on Win7.