Getting Started with the Windows Research Kernel (WRK)
Version 1.23 – Thursday April 23, 2009
Marty Humphrey, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia
Brian Burns, Program Manager, Microsoft
Serge Lidin, Software Design Engineer, Microsoft
The purpose of this document is to illustrate how to compile, modify, and use the Windows Research
Kernel (WRK). The basic idea is that you will edit and recompile the WRK on a Windows computer, and
then run it on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2003. The virtual machine will run in the
Virtual PC 2007 environment, which in turn runs under the host Windows OS. The host OS may be
Windows Server 2003 or later, or Windows XP or later. This document contains the steps you can take to
install everything you need to edit, compile, and run the WRK. The final section of this document
describes how to modify the WRK source code, recompile your kernel, and confirm that your changes are
executed by attaching a kernel debugger to the virtual machine. Throughout this document, there are nine
self-study questions.
The intended audience of this document are new users to the WRK with limited knowledge of the
Windows operating system. No special knowledge of operating system design and/or implementation is
necessary to perform the steps in this document. Editing the WRK can be accomplished by any text editor,
and compilation of the WRK utilizes the nmake utility that is installed with the WRK sources.
General Information
1. You will need to work rather extensively with the console (Windows Command Prompt)
windows. To start a fresh console window, use selections (Start All Programs Accessories
Command Prompt) OR (Start Run), then type “cmd” and click OK or press Enter.
2. To execute a command in the console window, type this command and press Enter.
3. There are four components you need to have installed on your machine: Windows Debugger,
Virtual PC 2007, virtual machine image of Windows Server 2003 SP1 (with virtual hard drive
image), and the WRK itself including source code, tools and binaries. Installation of virtual
machine with its hard drive image and of WRK boils down to simple copying them to specified
directories.
4. You can install all the components separately from respective entries on the DVD or you can
install everything using file WRKCompleteInstall.bat residing in the root of the DVD.
Working with WRKCompleteInstall.bat
The WRKCompleteInstall.bat takes four parameters specifying destination directories of the
components being installed:
/i <virtual_machine_directory>
/w <WRK_directory>
/d <debugger_directory>
/v <Virtual_PC_directory>