(Click here for a larger view of a still from "Porting Drivers to Windows Embedded CE 6.0")In a posting on Microsoft's Windows CE Base Team blog, co-presenter Travis Hobrla writes, "this presentation was developed by Juggs Ravalia and myself and has been floating around technical conferences (like MEDC) for a couple years. Now it is finally available online!"
The presentation "covers everything you need to know to port your driver to CE6.0, including access checking, marshalling, thread permissions, and security," he adds. The 45-minute video uses the WaveAPI driver as an example, looking at the code necessary to move a driver with complex complex memory management forward into CE 6.0, Hobrla says.
Presenter Hobrla has been a developer on the Windows CE Embedded BSP team since 2004, during which time he's been involved in developing and maintaining a number of BSPs (board support packages), according to Microsoft. He has also written an article, "
Understanding memory sections and the OEMAddressTable in Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0," that appears on WindowsForDevices.com.
In conjunction with the Windows Embedded Developer Interest Group (WE-DIG), Hobrla additionally hosted a February event devoted to porting Windows CE 5.0 BSPs to Windows CE 6.0. will host a chat about porting Windows CE 5.0 board support packages (BSPs) to CE 6.0. More information about that event, plus an earlier one-hour video on the topic, appears in our earlier coverage,
here.
Windows CE 6.0Windows CE 6.0 arrived in 2006, bringing with it a number of changes from version 5.0. Fundamental enhancements to the Windows CE kernel are said to include:
- Multitasking enhancements -- CE 6.0 supports up to 32,000 processes with 2 GB of virtual memory per process, versus CE 5.0's maximum of 32 processes having a maximum of 32 MB virtual memory each
- Improved performance -- OS processes are moved to kernel space; GWES, device driver manager, and file system manager are in kernel space for improved performance
- Addition of kernel mode drivers -- CE 5.0 only supported user mode drivers; kernel mode drivers offer performance, user mode drivers provide stability; additionally, there can be multiple instances of the user mode driver manager
- Strict partitioning of user mode and kernel mode
Further informationTo view the 45-minute video, "Porting Drivers to Windows Embedded CE 6.0," see the Channel 9 website,
here. Online viewing requires Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in, but the video is also available in downloadable MPEG-4 and WMV formats, according to the company.
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