Perhaps the book Advanced Windows Debugging by Mario Hewardt and Daniel Pravat will get you excited enough to take up "Kernel Development" work.
Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#92Microsoft is a friggin dumpster fire, dude. Some teams are great to work for, but a LOT of them are little crews of treacherous rogues who're only looking out for themselves and always ready to stab someone in the back. You'll run into a lot of the same issues on the Windows kernel that you're getting irritated with in service development land. A lot of infrastructure is already out there, but figuring out how to use…
> think that if you want to make the big bucks but still work with c/c++ Judging by the presenters at CPPCon, a significant fraction of highly-skilled and highly-paid C++ devs are employed in the High Frequency Trading (HFT) industry. They meet OP's criteria in many ways as well, as HFT trading tends to be "very close to the metal", optimised to death, and often involves solving deep technical problems. It's diametri…
The downside of working on HFT is that the value one provides to society is at best nil, and some would argue that it's negative. Some people care about things like that.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#93I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
poking directly at hardware registers
Such luxury! I just spent a couple weeks getting FreeBSD booting in the Firecracker VM and most of my debugging was performed by inserting hlt instructions into the FreeBSD kernel and looking at whether virtual CPU halted or hit a triple fault.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What pendantry is this? The only thing that you could take away from OP's comment is that they made a metaphor, and since you can make a metaphor about anything, the chosen metaphor says nothing? That's like saying, well, you can use words to construct a lie, therefore, all words are untrustworthy. He's saying that k8s can be powerful, but that that power can be destructive if not wielded correctly. Personally? k8s i…
That's not what I'm saying. I said that saying K8s is like X requires that you show how it is like X first, before you can draw any conclusions from that analogy. Otherwise, it is not an argument and should have zero value in a conversation, other than someone stating their (unsupported) opinion.
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#95I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
> I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS
This might be my all-time favorite quote that I never to get use in relevant situations because nobody is around who would get the reference. I think of it almost every time I hear the word "tool"
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#96I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
poking directly at hardware registers Such luxury! I just spent a couple weeks getting FreeBSD booting in the Firecracker VM and most of my debugging was performed by inserting hlt instructions into the FreeBSD kernel and looking at whether virtual CPU halted or hit a triple fault.
I take it the Firecrakcer folks haven't built out support for KVM_GUESTDBG_SINGLESTEP yet :)
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#97I worked in the kernel team many moons ago helping improve the performance and then built the .net clr later. Also worked on a NT Filesystem called Cairo. So I guess I have experienced both kernel dev and backend framework dev. Kernel code is amazing, especially the parts written by the early members like DaveC, MarkZ and others. For me the biggest part was working with a group of extremely smart people who were very…
I would love to hear any Cairo stories you may be able to share!
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#98I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
As an aside: James Mickens is a treasure. If anybody reading this hasn't read any of his articles or watched any of his talks before stop now and do it. You won't be sorry. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
He is also an incredible professor.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside: James Mickens is a treasure. If anybody reading this hasn't read any of his articles or watched any of his talks before stop now and do it. You won't be sorry. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
Reading this man's homepage he comes across as a insufferable egotist. I couldn't find any trace of didactic value among the self aggrandizing rhetoric not possible to convey with infinitely greater humility and persuasion as well as concision. Edit: reference source decades of being quite intolerable myself. Takes one to know one. And by my experience incredible good fortune and more decades to repent.
Having interacted with Mickens quite a bit, he is far from intolerable.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#100I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
So what you do in that case, add a monochrome adapter to the PC and write to the screen memory. Or send [greatly abbreviated] trace out a serial port.
In at least one instance of breaking my tools with my tools, the machines in question were in a data-center. Ordinarily one might be able to grab debugging output over an NC-SI link, but that only works if the breakage doesn't also unexpectedly crash your NIC firmware...