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A year and a half ago I touched on the subject of debugging process startup , such as the startup of Windows Services, using the GFlags utility (the ImageFileExecutionOptions registry key). The general idea is to rely on the Windows loader to launch a debugger instead of the debugged process, and trace your way through the process startup code. Unfortunately, this relies on the debugged process to run in the same session as you—otherwise, you won’t be able to actually see the debugger. Starting from...
Pedro Teixeira is going to talk about processes and threads in systems with more than 64 logical processors as well as user-mode scheduling. Surprisingly for some people, NUMA is not an esoteric hardware architecture. Even high-end gaming rigs today are NUMA; Pedro is going to use a loaned machine by HP that has 256 processors with 1TB of physical memory. Processor Groups Adding support for more than 64 logical processors required a breaking app compat change, because CPU masks were represented in...
It’s not the first time that I hear Mark Russinovich ’s session on the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 kernel changes. Eran Stiller wrote a good post summarizing the main kernel changes (based on the materials from the Windows 7 Bootcamp at the PDC pre-conference day), so I’m not going to repeat the same here. Additionally, you can watch Mark talk about Windows 7 internal changes on Channel 9 . Among the biggest kernel changes are optimizations that have to do with scaling Windows to hundreds...
Daniel Moth recently blogged about the sad fact that there are no managed APIs for working with more than 64 logical processors, even though as you probably know, Windows 7 (and of course Windows Server 2008 R2) features support for up to 256 logical processors. Frankly, these APIs aren’t designed to be very friendly, but sure enough they give you the ability to create threads (within a single process) that will run on different processor groups. As each processor group is limited to 64 processors...
I’m interrupting our scheduled series on the Windows 7 taskbar to talk about something entirely different: Trigger-start services. (Don’t worry, we will resume the exhaustive overview of all taskbar features fairly soon.) Over the years, as Windows has become more complicated, more and more background services were added to the system. Componentization and new features are the two primary forces behind this current. Hardware and software manufacturers have jumped the opportunity...