Kernel mode tests?

[Saulius Krasuckas]

* On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
> 
> We've already got ntoskrnl.exe, hal.dll, mountmgr.sys and usbd.sys,
  
> The problem, of course, is that on Windows these all run in kernel mode.
> 
> So what would be a good way to structure these regression tests?
> 
> We could cross-compile each test to a .sys file, 

Is it possible already using MinGW?

> install and load that, call it from user-space to run the tests, then 
> unload and uninstall.

Couldn't each test stay primarily as .exe with an accompanied .sys file?  
This would cover Kernel-User inter mode communication as well.

> This would work, but has the problem that a lot of
> complexity is necessary to set up the tests (driver signing,
> administrator access, UAC, etc.), 

Some of WinAPI tests also requires Administrator access and UAC, AFAIK.

> and any bugs that would crash a user-space application would now crash 
> Windows instead (we all know how easy that is :-).

For me it isn't a problem, because a Win-box under the risk isn't required 
to do somehing else.

Besides, test drivers could probably use exception handling to prevent 
some crashes.  Ah, SEH is only particularly used in usual Wine's test 
executables, so this statement is of no use, probably.

> Another possibility might be to use a custom program loader to load the 
> Windows .sys file being tested into user-space, the way we do now on 
> Wine, and test it like that. This seems to preclude us from testing 
> ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll though.

Plus it sounds like porting Wine core into Win32 and writing additional 
code to test the portage :(

Thus I vote for the first way.


S.