Under the Hood of AFD.sys Part 1: Investigating Undocumented Interfaces | Hacker News Reader

Under the Hood of AFD.sys Part 1: Investigating Undocumented Interfaces

leftarcode.com

41 pointsomegadev10 comments

There's an interesting talk about AFD.sys here too: https://av.tib.eu/media/32819

The real-but-unofficial name is Another Fucking Driver. I see a lot of comments online of people saying they used to work at Microsoft or heard from a friend that works there explaining how it got this name, but I 100% remember watching a Microsoft Build conference (maybe ~10 years ago?) where the person who wrote it said on stage that he really did call it that, but they had to name it Auxiliary Function Driver for obvious reasons.

Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet, but it definitely happened.

> Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet

Microsoft is apparently incapable of preserving their website—in particular, several years ago they destroyed what used to be the centralized store for all of their videos, MSDN’s Channel 9. I find it useful to open an Internet Archive snapshot of channel9.msdn.com from before ~2020 and navigate from there.

(If I sound a bit salty, it’s because I found that a huge number of threads on the Microsoft support forums, mostly concerning older products, was “retired”—i.e. memory-holed—recently enough that Google still thinks they’re there. While the “support” part was always a joke, the threads were still occasionally better than a big fat nothing, which is what we have now.)

Yeah, that original name is corroborated by Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20171114-00/?p=97...

Wouldn’t be the “person who wrote it” unless he came back to do some special presentation. That guy left windows (and maybe even Microsoft) in the mid 90s. AFD has been around since the beginning of NT (edit at least 3.51, maybe even before that)

The guy who wrote it is literally some high up exec at Microsoft now, which is why he was presenting it, that's all I remember of him.

hmm, you're right. You're probably talking about David Treadwell, who was at MSFT until 2016-ish. I was thinking of another member on the original Winsock team who left in the 90s.

The random Polish in the middle got me

fun fact (or not so fun): incidentally, AFD (or more precisely written AfD) is also the name of a radical far-right party in Germany. The party has progressively shifted to the fringe and is now classified as "confirmed right-wing extremist" by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), Germany's main domestic intelligence agency. Ref:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Office_for_the_Protect...

It's interesting to see which prominent figures of tech and politics in the USA have publicly associated with the AfD.

Windows APIs are truly hideous

I really don't see what you mean. What do you find hideous here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com