Instrument a Windows 7 Bluetooth stack

Question

I'm working with various (mostly Bluetooth) development boards (ConnectBlue, Ubertooth, USRPs etc.) in order to research about Bluetooth communication behaviour at PHY level. In order to get some more insights I'm looking for a way to debug the Bluetooth stack on a Windows 7 Desktop computer. My use-case is relatively simple: I have custom baseband implementations, which establish connections with the Windows computer. I'd like to see everything the Bluetooth hardware/driver does.

I'm not sure how to approach this: I'd like to see when the Bluetooth Chip/Windows driver receives a Signal, and how it (the message) gets interpreted/formatted/passed through the various APIs concerned. Mostly this relates to kernel debugging. Is there a way to display the state of the attached hardware in Windows in WinDBG? Maybe to perform (Kernel) API logging on the Bluetooth kernel service?

I hope somebody more familiar with device driver debugging and Windows Kernel services can give me some pointers here.

Answer 1

Since you don't appear to have gotten any hits on this, I'll post what I can.

I don't have any definite answers, but on the NTDebugging blog they often do hardware level debugging in windbg.

I.e. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2007/06/22/where-the-rubber-meets-the-road-or-in-this-case-the-hardware-meets-the-probe.aspx

To be honest this is going to require extensive knowledge not only of your hardware, but also of the deep internals of windows, and how the bluetooth stack is written, but the WDK would probably be a good place to start for understanding the bluetooth stack. I would also check out the blog for tips and tricks.

The other place to check and ask questions is http://osronline.com/ It's one of the better communities about device drivers, so they should have some reasonable tips on doing what you're trying to do.