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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?

#81

Post by sodapopcan »

retcon wrote: post #68
EvanAnderson wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

I think even with the edit that this comment is also satire.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#82

Post by matthewfcarlson »

Ombudsman wrote: post #43

Bad stuff: 1. There will be a lot of infrastructure complexity in the kernel, just prepare yourself for that. Even worse bugs! You'll be fixing a lot of bugs, or looking at a lot of bugs, and most of these bugs are from other teams who are interacting with your component! Just order a copy of Windows Internals and get yourself familiar with how thing work. 2. Old ass engineering systems. Just as the interviewers said…

This comment is something that matches my experience. My new company tends to have worse work life balance but higher pay. It’s a trade off. I think the best play is join microsoft and leave after the nice sign off bonus all vests. I can’t complain about the ride, just the drop at the end.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#84

Post by vbitz »

starfleet_bop wrote: post #73
amluto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I’m a Linux kernel dev) Tools like windbg probably work great until you are debugging the code that runs when windbg tries to take over. Or you’re debugging something sensitive to interrupts and it’s literally impossible to keep up with a tool like windbg. Or you a debugging something that overwrites windbg in memory because you have a corrupt pointer. Or you triple-fault the machine and it reboots with so much prej…

Does x86 have a JTAG like / hardware debugger?

You can get something like JTAG from Intel with a NDA.

https://designintools.intel.com/Silicon_View_Technology_Clos...

Most of the time you can do kernel dev with a serial port and printf though.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#85

Post by phendrenad2 »

I'm in the same boat. I've been a backend web developer for so long, I've almost become accustomed to the kubernetes churn. I sometimes dabble in kernel dev, and sometimes want to show off my skills to a company like Google and try to go work on Fuchsia or Android or something. But it feels like grass-is-greener thinking, and I'm wary of such things, having burned myself by falling for it before.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#87

Post by jiggawatts »

oldmanhorton wrote: post #28

I've worked adjacent to windows for a few years, and it's not perfect. They have mountains of legacy requirements by the very nature of being windows and other comments about siloed culture can often be true, though I think this is true in most large companies. With that being said, windows kernel developers are by and large extremely skilled and passionate, and working on that team is pretty unique within most of so…

> A large part of the kernel team is working on features that only benefit Azure

And the IIS team, and the networking team, and…

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#88

Post by CodeWriter23 »

jsolson wrote: post #37

I 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.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#89

Post by jackling »

jvert wrote: post #33

I spent about ten years on the Windows Kernel team. In the 90's, so likely very different than what you would experience today, but probably still a lot of the same problems. (Funny to hear people are still complaining about windbg!) I think you are coming at this from the wrong perspective. Rather than thinking about how to avoid work you DON'T like, think about what you DO like and then decide if the new job would…

Don't you find it difficult to transition from one domain to another?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#90

Post by int_19h »

hyperrail wrote: post #56
hyperrail wrote: post #52

Here's my thoughts based on working on Windows in-box code (user mode only, though) across 2 different Windows component teams, totaling about 5 years with a break in the middle. (Split into multiple comments for readability. Some parts removed because other people said it better.) Most importantly, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE JOB IS! Microsoft people don't try to be dishonest, but there can be misunderstandings betw…

Even if you do work on Windows in-box code only, it might not be so easy. Here's another issue you raised with your old job: > 2. Debugging exclusively via metrics and logs, since I can't just attach a debugger to a running server. I find debugging Windows issues fun, but it might not be for you. On rare occasions, you might be lucky even to have telemetry and logs, for customer issues that can't be reliably reproduc…

To be fair, Watson post-mortem debugging is something that pretty much every team that ships a product running on users' hardware has to deal with.
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