delphi – Winrollback/DeepFreeze How these softwares work? – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/08/06
StackOverflow user opcOde wrote something interesting:
Writing device drivers in delphi is hard to impossible.
Here is an attempt to write drivers in delphi.
It is funny to see the link pointing to the DelphiBasics site: Advanced Delphi Driver Development Kit – DelphiBasics.
On my list of things to remember: might come in very useful one day (:
Note that opcOde also has an interesting blog: opc0de | just another enthusiastic coder.
–jeroen
via delphi – Winrollback/DeepFreeze How these softwares work? – Stack Overflow.
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David Heffernan said
Why would you want to write a driver in Delphi? Even assuming that you can persuade the compiler to do what you need.
jpluimers said
There can be many reasons.
Why write a Windows tool including UI in Python? DropBox does and they are darn successful.
David Heffernan said
Writing desktop apps in Python makes plenty sense. Writing kernel drivers in anything other than asm or C does not. All the tooling is for asm or C. Using Delphi is just asking for pain. And for what gain? You will still end up with code that looks like C. You can’t raise exceptions, use GetMem, dynamic arrays, instantiate instances of classes. You cannot use strings. Why would you use other than C?
KMorwath said
Writing driver is something that requires a good knowledge of how the kernel works. WinDriver is the usual wrapper that attempts to make thing easier, but when it comes to drivers it’s better to know exactly what you and your driver is doing.
jpluimers said
Oh yes. Writing a driver is much more difficult than writing library code. Which is already a lot more difficult than writing application level code.
kmorwath said
The risk is a bad written driver can hang or slow down a system, or open big vulnerabilities into it. I would advise anyboy who needs to write a driver to learn how to properly code one, and don’t rely too much on wrappers.
jpluimers said
Thanks for the advice.
–jeroen
SilverWarior said
As far as I know theese kind of software registers custom build Rootkit which replaces default Windows filehandling routines.
Similar Rootkits are used in varous Viruses to bypas default security and hid certain files from user and even from certain Anti-Virus software.
Writing such rootik won’t be easy as you first need to write one which would have full capabilites of Windows filehandling routines otherivese you would crash whole OS.
As far as writing driver goes there is a nice piece of software called WinDriver which makes writing drivers much easier.
I used it some years ago for writing custom driver for my old Dial-Up modem since default drivers didn’t provide me with full speed as the modem itself was not made for my country and therefore needed special initialization routine before establishing conection.
And yes I was able to write driver software with Delphi 7.
WinDriver software instals special driver to help you debuging your own driver without crashing whole OS.
jpluimers said
Interesting!
Good to know about WinDriver.