Under the Hood of AFD.sys Part 1: Investigating Undocumented Interfaces
4 comments
·August 3, 2025lloydatkinson
There's an interesting talk about AFD.sys here too: https://av.tib.eu/media/32819
The real-but-unofficial name is Another Fucking Driver. I see a lot of comments online of people saying they used to work at Microsoft or heard from a friend that works there explaining how it got this name, but I 100% remember watching a Microsoft Build conference (maybe ~10 years ago?) where the person who wrote it said on stage that he really did call it that, but they had to name it Auxiliary Function Driver for obvious reasons.
Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet, but it definitely happened.
mananaysiempre
> Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet
Microsoft is apparently incapable of preserving their website—in particular, several years ago they destroyed what used to be the centralized store for all of their videos, MSDN’s Channel 9. I find it useful to open an Internet Archive snapshot of channel9.msdn.com from before ~2020 and navigate from there.
(If I sound a bit salty, it’s because I found that a huge number of threads on the Microsoft support forums, mostly concerning older products, was “retired”—i.e. memory-holed—recently enough that Google still thinks they’re there. While the “support” part was always a joke, the threads were still occasionally better than a big fat nothing, which is what we have now.)
ZeroWidthJoiner
Yeah, that original name is corroborated by Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20171114-00/?p=97...
Windows APIs are truly hideous