Win32 driver development (DDK stuff) using MinGW

Intro

I've been wondering for some time (years) if it would be possible to build a Windows driver using the GNU toolchain (i.e., the MinGW environment). Years ago, I did some reading about the PE-COFF format, got some PE-COFF header editor etc., read some Windows-specific documentation to GCC+LD, found some excellent articles at CodeProject.com, installed MinGW and did some user-space coding... but I never made it to the "holy grail": never wrote a kernel-mode driver using pure MinGW. Never wrote a Windows kernel-mode driver of any kind, for that matter.

A few weeks ago, by pure chance, I stumbled over a gem of source code, written by Marcel Telka many years ago, which demonstrates just that :-) Marcel has managed all the black magic = "under the hood setup" to get a proper kernel-mode Windows binary out of GCC. Well it's just a couple cmdline arguments to MinGW-GCC in the Makefile.
His source was a little rough-cut / serving a specific purpose, so I shuffled the code a bit to meet my esthetic measures :-)

This webpage is currently just an "HTML face plate" for my sample skeleton driver. I plan to add more info if I manage to produce any.

Ahh well. I've managed to produce an NT-level skeleton that compiles and works in 32bit Windows XP (not even a proper full-fledged WDM driver) - while the current mainstream is Windows 7 WDF and maybe 64bit. MinGW-w64 is already past release 1.0 - but I'm already running ouf of time and energy for further adventures in that vein...

The skeleton driver

Here's the source code - feel free to use it as a starting point for your own adventures. This is its primary purpose. It doesn't need much further comment. The Makefile is written by bare hand. I'm using VIM to edit my source code - there is a VIM script + a batch file that load all the files into your VIM session.

References

I.e., where I got the hard facts (quite some part of the source code, actually):

• The ioperm.sys driver for Windows by Marcel Telka
• Code Project's series of tutorial articles called "Driver development" by Toby Opferman - there are 6 parts: _1_ _2_ _3_ _4_ _5_ _6_
• Another interesting article at Code Project, by Bruno van Dooren (on WDF). Contains good links to further reading.
• The basic kernel-mode functions are quite well documented at the MSDN. You can also download an install CD of the WDK = Windows Driver Kit, containing driver code samples. The WDK is not required to build my skeletal driver, as MinGW's got its own DDK headers (not a hint of WDM or WDF).
• LordPE - the PE-COFF file editor (no homepage, no updates) - but there are several such PE editors out there
• PE-COFF - a wikipedia article, containing links to further documentation

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