how to crash your OS

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Y'all,

Windows since NT has a thingy called HAL (remember the computer from
Arthur C. Clarke's 2001?), which stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer.
It's function is to shield the hardware from apps. It is supposed to
prevent apps from accessing the hardware directly; apps have to go
through the HAL first, which acts as an arbiter and prevents any one app
from locking up all the resources. In theory. In practice, however, some
apps require direct access to hardware, otherwise they don't function,
and these apps can still cause your classic blue-screen-of-death
memory-dump type crash-and-burn. I see this every week, as I work with
packet analysers (or sniffers); these apps require direct access to the
network interface card (for example, to persuade the NIC to go into
promiscuous mode and sample all packets, including errors which a NIC
normally discards). When a sniffer goes down, it generally takes the
whole OS down with it and requires not only a reboot, but a re-install
of at least the sniffer software. In rare cases, I have seen a sniffer
crash corrupt NIC driver files.

I suppose some old DOS programs might cause similar problems, possibly
corrupting printer .dll files if the crash occurred while accessing such
.dll files.

≪MD FL≫