Windows internals
by Mark E. Russinovich · first published 2012
10mentions
8recommended by
10HN commenters
2012–2022first – last mentioned
80% recommend20% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Detailed reference on Windows NT internals, covering the cache manager, process creation, and drivers. Best suited to engineers who already understand general OS concepts and want to understand the system.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…....and once you understand those primitives, you can start to appreciate the layered driver model, new thread pool stuff in Vista+, registered I/O in Windows 8+, etc. Books... my recommendation... Windows Internals is the best place to start: http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-Developer-Refer... Oh, and basically any article Russinovich has written, check out the list on the articles section on his wiki…
on “Microsoft Announces Nano Server” ↗…The key takeaway is its all the Win32 stuff that contributes the bulk of the overhead, not the fundamental process or thread primitives themselves. EDIT: If you want to learn more, Mark Russinovich's Windows Internals has a whole chapter on process creation which I'm sure explains all this.
on “A fork() in the road” ↗Windows Internals, Parts 1 and 2 by Mark Russinovich. And the leaked source code of NT4.
on “Writing Shellcode in C/C++” ↗My respect for NT grew tremendously after reading one of the early editions of Mark Russinovich and David Solomon's "Windows Internals". I haven't seen more recent editions but I'd suspect they just as informative. The Wikipedia article on NT architecture is decent enough (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT), and…
on “Support for better symlink handling in Windows 10” ↗Another good book for Windows is "Windows Internals" from Mark Russinovich and David A Solomon (SysInternals folks). It's not for writing applications, but rather understanding how Windows works (The Cache Manager section for example)
on “Programming Windows 6th Edition” ↗For more about this, have a look at "Windows Internals" (6th edition is the latest, I believe) by Mark Russinovich, David Solomon and Alex Ionescu. It's an awesome book.
on “Windows Kernel Architecture Internals (2010) [pdf]” ↗"Windows Internals" 7th ed. part 1 and 2 by Mark Russinovich would be the definitive current reference on how Windows itself works but assumes knowledge of how operating systems in general work already. For general OS…
on “Ask HN: Best Book for learning about Operating Systems, especially windows?” ↗Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich. It is the bible of windows development.
on “Windows is the strangest, or hardest, operating system to keep curl support for” ↗The original author was Mark E. Russinovich from "Sysinternals fame", nowadays other developers continue the new editions. http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Edition-Developer-Re... http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Edition-Developer-Re... Additionally the books for user mode programming from Jeffrey Richter and Charles Petzold tend to be quite good…
on “Xv6” ↗Microsoft steals ReactOS developers to become Windows kernel developers. The last two editions of Windows Internals list Alex Ionescu as co-author. Alex Ionescu was the lead ReactOS developer before Mark Russinovich stole him.
on “ReactOS: Rebuilding Microsoft Windows from the ground up, fully open-source” ↗