siwu’s blog

Metered Sections: Illegitimate child of Mutexes and Critical Sections

A quick post to talk about something I came across lately.
Whenever you want to do exclusive access on resources or thread synchronization, two choices comes to mind: Mutexes, and Critical Sections. The first is slow, and the later is exclusive only and limited to the current process.

But guess what? The guys at Redmond created a monster: introduce Metered Sections.
“This article develops a new synchronization object called a metered section. It has the advantages of speed, the ability to synchronize across processes, the ability to control access to a shared resource with more than just mutual exclusion semantics (resource counting), and supports all current Win32 platforms.”

What is interesting is that this article is from 1998, and until now I didn’t heard anyone talking of it! Surely a nice thing to know about

Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 4: The real thing

Sooo, here we are. We finally reached the real PrintWindow() implementation. And before we start to comment, let’s take a look at the code:
Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Windows XP Window Manager, Part 4: The real thing…

Not much eh ?

Yeah yeah I know, it’s been a while since I last posted on this blog. Actually right now I’m quite busy with real life stuff since I’m getting a new job
But for those of you waiting, here is a tease of the articles I’ll be posting:

• Finishing the WinXP Window Manager reverse engineering
• Reversing the Vista DWM

Have fun