windows driver development

Question

I am new to windows driver development, so please bear with me if my question is being too stupid. Well, I am not sure why, as MSDN suggested and also the way I perceived, the host computer, e.g developing the driver, and the target computer, e.g debugging the driver, need to be two separate ones. why such separation? I did try to merge those two by deploying and debugging a driver on the host computer, in which I am developing a driver, and it seemed work with no objection from windows. Thanks.

PS. Source like this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh698272(v=vs.85).aspx got me think so.

Answer 1

Practically, when you are developing and testing a driver, in many situation you will get system crash (BSOD) and your system may not be bootable. In such situations your development + debugger environment is also gone/in-accessible.

Answer 2

Two separate machines are required for kernel debugging. You cannot debug self by obvious reasons (a debugger and a debuggee are in the same kernel and a deadlock appears). Of course, the target machine can be a virtual one.

Answer 3

When we develop a driver and test it the system will crash and a blue screen (called BSOD - blue screen of death)will show up. This is not the case like developing a User mode application and it crashed due to a memory error. Your driver will be running as a kernel mode application , If it crashes due to any illegal memory operation then the whole system is gone. It is not a simple issue to resolve , You need to log into safe mode and remove the driver from your system to recover it.

Due to this it is preferred to use a target machine mostly a VM on which the driver is installed and a host machine there we will be using a debugger to debug the driver.