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by yjftsjthsd-h 2187 days ago
Oh, interesting; I'd assumed that NT was just using libc as its stable ABI, but on further reading it looks more like ntdll.dll (probably just for that personality?). Similar concept, slightly different place. Still, my point was that under the "Windows" personalities, you talk to a library, never directly to the kernel.

EDIT: Found https://web.archive.org/web/20121224002314/http://netcode.cz... which if I'm reading right indicates that ntdll is indeed the bottom-layer library that's allowed to actually talk to the kernel.
1 comments
pjmlp 2187 days ago
Yes, ntdll is the lowest level, but you aren't supposed to use it directly, and if you do, well no one is going to help when a patch Tuesday or something like that breaks the application.

The personality DLLs are the applications entry point with the kernel.

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monocasa 2187 days ago
Most of ntdll.dll is officially sanctioned at this point. It's officially documented, and obviously plays into the backwards compat choices they make.
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pjmlp 2187 days ago
Not really, Windows Internals always refers to the few public ones as "take care when relying on this", very few entries do exist on MSDN or Technet, and those that do exist are mostly tailored for device drivers scenarios.
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ChrisSD 2187 days ago
Sort of. Many NT functions are officially documented. But they're also officially documented as unstable. They probably won't break many of the oldest functions but they reserve the right to do so at some point.
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