Building an ARM Windows Driver

I tried this natively on the ARM64-Windows box, but ran into some compilation errors. In order to build this driver I needed to use Visual Studio Enterprise on my X86 developer laptop and cross-compile to arm64.

I need some code from a user space application to execute some code in EL1. The only way to do that is apparently to create a driver. So I started here Building ARM64 Windows Drivers.

• Download the Windows SDK. Ensure that you have SDK version 16299 (Windows 10, version 1709) or later.

  I had to uninstall a few other SDKs first, before this would allow itself to be installed.

• Download the WDK. Ensure that you have WDK version 16299 or later. Put the arm64 tools dir in the PATH.

  This didn't work when it went to install the extension into Visual Studio, but I was able to search for and add the extension from within Visual Studio itself.

I will want to build a KMDF (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) driver, to be able to run in kernel mode.

Starting with Write a Hello World Windows Driver (KMDF). Then write assembly code to set/clear uci. I needed to create a custom build rule for this in the solution to use armasm64.

I am able to build this with a cross compile. So I'll need to deploy it to the ARM-Windows machine for testing.

In these steps target machine is the ARM64-Windows machine. Host machine is my laptop.

• Connect to the target machine by RDP
• Deploy the whole ARMEE_Driver folder over to the target machine (copy and paste via RDP)
• In admin terminal NOT POWERSHELL on target machine execute

  Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22621.3447]
  (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
  
  sc delete ARMEE_Driver
  devcon install c:\Users\zac\Desktop\ARMEE_Driver\ARMEE_Driver.inf "Root\ARMEE_Driver"
  

  Note: Don't use these. These are just breadcrumbs of things I tried and are here for reference.

  // bcdedit /set testsigning on
  // cd c:\Users\zac\Desktop\ARMEE_Driver
  // sc create ARMEE_Driver type=kernel start=demand binPath="c:\Users\zac\Desktop\ARMEE_Driver\ARMEE_Driver.sys"
  // sc start ARMEE_Driver
  
  // You can also right click the .inf file and install it.
  
  // queries:
  // devcon status Root/ARMEE_Driver
  // sc qc ARMEE_Driver
  // sc query ARMEE_Driver
  // sc status ARMEE_Driver

Kernel Driver Debugging

Use WinDbg for ARM64, local live kernel debugging on the target machine.

bcdedit -debug on