WinPE as a stateless harness for Windows driver testing and fuzzing

for newer Windows versions, Microsoft also offers a PE-like customizable image for validation purposes explicitly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

TIL. Thanks for the link; and it's only 2.2 GB too! Wonder if this would make a good candidate for power users looking for a bloat-free Windows version, like for running inside a VM, or keeping it on their Ventoy USB as a rescue/recovery alternative to WinPE...

Oh "Preinstallation Environment" not PE as in the executable header in windows.

For a CI, my best bet would be to save a running snapshot of each OS to test and derive a new instance from there for every job. Also isolate the network bridge from the outside world. The only thing you may have to fix is time synchronization, but your vmm could already be taking care of that.

It just occurred to me that there shouldn't be any cronjobs / scheduled tasks or a disabled cron daemon / task scheduler in the virtual machines. That's because when the vm wakes up an ever increasing number of days later, it could run all sorts of scheduled maintenance jobs.

...But you guys knew that already ^^

That’s nice. Windows drivers have always been a PITA to test.