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I got to build a driver once, making an NDIS LWF encap/decap driver for Windows. I found it extremely soothing, and kind of old school - I had to use a real machine in my office with firewire debugging, and use windbg like a greybeard.

But not having the right documentation was a challenge. MSDN is okay, but the weird mechanics of MDL chains don't really get discussed on Stack Overflow.



> But not having the right documentation was a challenge.

How do people overcome this? I managed to reverse my laptop's LED commands: they were implemented via USB so I used wireshark to intercept and analyze the data sent by the proprietary vendor software. What if it's some ACPI thing though? Or some memory mapped I/O chip? How do people figure out how it works?




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