Kernel mode tests?

[Damjan Jovanovic]

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