Re: Re:Debugging in the device-kernel

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Having wasted over 2 months of calendar time and over a man-year of work
because of bugs in SoftIce I am not inclined to be charitable. In fact
nowadays SoftIce adds a 25% premium to my rates (to cover the crap). And
that does not account for the fact that one can do things faster with 2
systems, and not worry about corrupting the development environment. I have
figured for most of my onsite the "savings from SoftIce" are lost in the
first 2 days I am in the building.

Versus WinDBG I have never found SoftIce to be better and that includes the
dark days of Windows NT 3.5 through NT 4.0 when WinDBG was not what one
would call a robust product.


--
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
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"anton bassov" <xxx@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:21e3b755ed4c479aa3bc01350f60ab43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi mate

I am afraid you got too hard on the SoftIce - "lousy tool" is, in my
opinion,
is a bit too strong statement. It is not perfect, I admit - once I had to
spend some time investigating non-existent problem with IOAPIC.
Furthermore,
it may pose some problems on the machine with dual-core processor.
However,
the statement about making you introduce bugs into your code is, in my
opinion, is a bit too far-fetched.


Furthermore, don't forget about the complexity of its job - writing a
kernel
debugger that does not require a second machine is quite challeging task
in
itself, especially if it you happen to be MS outsider.


In general, when it comes to disassembling Windows kernel, I find SoftIce
quite helpfull.


Regards

Anton Bassov


.

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