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by skissane
1479 days ago
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> 3) HAL Extensions (for those unaware they are tiny modules that allow you to extend the Windows HAL with functions for non standard hardware) are not tenable at the moment since they're limited in the APIs they use I haven't heard of those before, and I'm fascinated by them. I go looking for documentation – and I can't find any on Microsoft's website – some documentation which mentions their existence, [0] but no details on the API or how to write them. Is this something you have to sign an NDA with Microsoft to get access to the headers and docs for it? Or will I find the headers hidden away in the WDK somewhere? Is there any good public source of info on them? The best I've found is [1] – which includes some important details but isn't comprehensive (not that anyone would expect a slide deck to be). [0] e.g. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/hlk/t... [1] https://infocon.org/cons/SyScan/SyScan%202012%20Singapore/Sy... |
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Turns out the header file is included in the Windows 10 SDK, as km/nthalext.h
Not the very latest version, but someone posted it on GitHub here: https://github.com/tpn/winsdk-10/blob/master/Include/10.0.16...
(You can download the multi-gigabyte Windows 10/11/2022 SDKs to get a more recent one, although not sure if anything has changed.)
Still doesn't seem to be any public documentation. The header includes very detailed comments, but (as you'd expect for header file comments) they concentrate on the nitty-gritty and omit the big picture.
Searching "nthalext.h" on GitHub finds source code for a handful of HAL extensions, so at least there is some sample code to look at. Microsoft has even open-sourced a few – see https://github.com/ms-iot/imx-iotcore/tree/public_preview/ha...
Microsoft used to include HAL extension samples in the Windows 10 driver samples – https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/5b8... – but removed them as part of the Anniversary update – https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/96e...