You do remember that in the good old days, many of us have had to use Windows 98 (rather than Win XP ) when we needed to use the SOFTICE debugger, as SOFTICE was quite unstable on Windows 2000 and Win XP (until they finally released a patch after more than an year at that time).

Also, for the jump from 16-bit to 32-bit, mostly the issues addressed were related to STABILITY, in teh various releases of Windows, rather than mainly focussing on SECURITY.

Whereas in the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit versions of Windows, mainly for Windows 10 releases, the focus is now more on SECURITY rather than on stability, as the stability (BSODs etc) were not the main issue from XP onwards on properly configuerd systems.

That is why, in my practical experience, driver debugging is a nightmare on the 64-bit versions of Windows 10 due to its numerous security features, compared to its 32-bit counterpart.

Cheers :)

@Fyyre, @sf42

any update on the private symbols?

I have no idea if any of the builds have private symbols or not. Here's a list of what is available.

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6083&start=475

Can you obtain anything from that list? There are several interesting things which would be great to have there. I would personally like all these things but if the OS are to big then the debug symbols would be very cool as well.

Such as these checked debug symbols:
Added: Microsoft Windows 10 Debug Symbols (10.0.10540.0) (x64chk beta)
Added: Microsoft Windows 10 Debug Symbols (10.0.10540.0) (x86chk beta)

And these checked Windows 10 OS:
Added: 10.0.10540.0.th2_release.150903-1605_amd64chk_client-professional-core_retail_en-us
Added: 10.0.10540.0.th2_release.150903-1605_x86chk_client-professional-core_retail_en-us
Added: 10.0.10575.0.th2_release.151017-2006_amd64chk_client-professional-core_retail_en-us
Added: 10.0.10575.0.th2_release.151017-2006_x86chk_client-professional-core_retail_en-us

Here you go!

Debug symbols: https://mega.nz/#!EGpG3CAC!5UMzYsLat91aG6KmbhL0DET_Kqmdh3u-tYUYlvouxjs

Contains symbols for:

• 10.0.10540.0 x64 (Checked)
• 10.0.10540.0 x86 (Checked)
• 10.0.16251.1000 x86
• 10.0.16278.1000 x64

Debug/Checked Windows Builds:
10.0.10575.0 x64 Pro: https://mega.nz/#!8apCmK5T!I_2LwiCH1uK85PpXSrvGUAlOz5mQ9KA4k-m7W2PTpHs
10.0.10575.0 x86 Pro: https://mega.nz/#!9PpVQA5T!Ap9e5afdRg-G5M_2ySpQqi51-wC6KnmyAw970a8bs48

Password is "eXeTools".

What we are looking for are actually private symbols :)

The "normal" symbols are available freely for download from Microsoft for everyone ... For example, from this page ...

They can also be downloaded as needed from their Symbol Server...

So please share the "private" symbols if possible ...

Thank you :)

The problem is that I have no idea which builds include private symbols!

Can we get the size of the builds, perhaps given the large size of the private symbols, there is a correlation in the build size or some other hint like build numbers or naming convention, etc so we don't have to go through the laborious one by one download task.

Guys, there are lots of tools like pdbdump/etc etc

lets use it over all the *.pdb and compare
profit?

where's the source?

I have the OpenNT, Windows NT, some win2k leaks...any interest there?

I would like to have them for my collection, would be nice if you could post them. :)

https://releases.opennt.eu/

When you build any program or driver, usually compiler creates PDB file, but, there are two options, when linker writes it: /PDB - usual (normal) debug information and /PDBSTRIPPED - do not include some type, class and function information for private symbols. By default, all symbols are visible, but again, you can restrict this by only exported (public) symbols.

I presume, that PDB files for NT kernel for example, if they are really full, should by 2-3 times bigger, than usual ones. Checked builds - are not builds with private symbols, but contain different assertions and checks (so they are called "checked"), they are useful for hard debugging, but do not contain much additional information about kernel internals.