KD 1394 Work-Around

Hey everyone!

The most recent Windows 10 preview(build 14901) no longer includes the ability to be kernel debugged over 1394(firewire) out of the box. We looked at a lot of data to make this decision, and decided with how many PCs are shipping with 1394, and how few people were using 1394 for KD, and the cost to maintain it, the value of keeping it just wasn't there. We will continue to optimize KDNET and by focusing on fewer physical transports, this change will help us to continue to enhance KDNET. For those of you that use 1394 because it used to gather dumps faster than KDNET, I highly recommend trying out KDNET on a newer debugger release as we've made a lot of improvements to dump gathering.  KDNET should typically be significantly faster to capture a dump than 1394, and can be easily setup with kdnet.exe that ships with the kits or by following the directions on MSDN: Setting Up Kernel-Mode Debugging over a Network Cable Manually.

We aren't completely getting rid of our 1394 support, we've decided to move the 1394 binary into to the kits so that people can still use it. We still have a few changes we need to do to the kits to pull in the driver so expect that with the next SDK preview.

Edit: As of the 14951 SDK preview, the 1394 driver is available in the 1394 folder of the debugger install directory.

Until then, if you need 1394, you can:

  1. Copy kd1394.dll from C:\Windows.old\Windows\system32\kd1394.dll (or from the C:\Windows\system32 directory of any older Windows 10 install) to C:\Windows\system32
  2. Run bcdedit -set {dbgsettings} debugtype 1394
    bcdedit -set {dbgsettings} channel n  (where n is the 1394 channel you typically use 0, 1, 2, … 63)
  3. Reboot and you're good to go!

-Andy
@aluhrs13