Re: How to check if a spin lock has been freed or released?

For FreeBSD, one of the solutions would be to implement the exact clone of
Windows KSPIN_LOCK (in addition to a normal FreeBSD's spinlocks) and use it for
NDIS spinlocks. This would require, though, the mapping of Window's notion of
IRQL to some FreeBSD's entity.

About AML. Many motherboards have just buggy ACPI support, this is hardly a
blame addressed to Microsoft.

Older MS OSes like w2k were very permitting in terms of buggy ACPI support
in BIOS. 2003 Server is no more. I have the mobo running fine on 2000 and XP,
but the front panel power button just does not work at all on 2003 :-)

The only issue is that BIOS authors immediately abused this permittivity by
MS, and from now on the other OS makers must be "this permissive" too, with the
very vague notion of "this" - the degree of how w2k is permissive to AML bugs
is not documented anywhere (surely).

Maybe MS should issue some analog of Driver Verifier for ACPI BIOSes and at
least withdraw the mobos not passing the tests from their HCL, but I don't
think this is already done (maybe due to lack of real-world motivation to
lessen the number of hardware able to run Windows).

Also note - MS ignores the obsolete hardware. 100% ignores it. They will
never even accept any claims about Server 2003 running badly on particular
Pentium-III 800MHz machine of 2000 vintage. For Linux and FreeBSD, this can be
not so - lots of people are running these OSes on very, very obsolete hardware.

This means that, if newer MS OS will be lesser permittive in AML bugs, and
some mobo will be broken - MS will be able to declare it "obsolete" and ignore
it.

> bugs like NdisFreeSpinLock() misuse would show up immediately during
> testing on the 95/98/ME platforms (assuming they, like CE, have an
> NdisFreeSpinLock() that's also not a no-op).

95/8/Me are uniprocessor by design, I expect them to have the whole spinlock
implementation as no-op. Well, it can be restricted to the analog on
KeRaise/LowerIrql, as it is done in uniprocessor NT kernels, but the spinlock
object will not be used by _any_ spinlock APIs, not only NdisFreeSpinLock.

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.storagecraft.com

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