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Debugging How GUI Thread Conversion on Svr03 Breaks the SEH Chain

The Windows kernel maintains two types of threads – Non-GUI threads, and GUI threads. Non-GUI threads threads use the default stack size of 12KB (on i386, which this this discussion applies to) and the default System Service Descriptor table (SSDT), KeServiceDescriptorTable. GUI threads, in contrast, are expected to have much larger stack requirements and thus use an extended stack size of 60 KB (Note: these are the numbers for Svr03 and may vary among releases). Continue »

Debugging Thread 0:0 is special

Thread IDs uniquely identify a thread – this certainly holds for user mode threads and should also hold for kernel mode threads. But there is one kind of thread where the ID does not uniquely identify a KTHREAD – the Idle thread. On a uniprocessor system, there is only one Idle thread and this idle thread will have the thread ID 0 (in process 0). On a multiprocessor system, however, Windows creates one Idle thread per CPU. Continue »