Kernel mode tests?

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 8:40 AM, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> We've already got ntoskrnl.exe, hal.dll, mountmgr.sys and usbd.sys,
> with at least usbhub.sys hopefully coming soon, and I've been thinking
> it's a good idea to have some regressions tests for these.
>
> 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, install and load
> that, call it from user-space to run the tests, then unload and
> uninstall. 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.), and any bugs that would crash a
> user-space application would now crash Windows instead (we all know
> how easy that is :-).
>
> 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.
>
> Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?
>
> Thank you
> Damjan Jovanovic
>
>
>

These test sound very specialized and I'm not sure if they can be run
by much people. I'm not sure if you should have to make it that
complex, to me it sounds like a perfect thing for the the vmware based
winetestbot service.

Roderick