Then you will need another server machine for HCK and 8 other computers to certify your driver on Win7圆4, Win7x86, Win8圆4, Win8x86, Win8.1圆4, Win8.1x86, server 2008, server 2012…. To certify audio driver on Windows server 2016 requires 2 other computers (one server 2012 and one server 2016) because the certification is made with a previous version of HLK studio (and different version of HLK or HCK studio cannot be installed on a same server). The certification process is taking more than 24 hours by the way… Consequently to certify an audio driver on WIN10, requires 3x computers (one server, one win10 圆4 and one Win10 x86). One computer is needed for each target platform each computer cannot be used for something else. One computer with server 2012 R2 must be setup to install HLK Studio and a second computer (quad core) is required to make the target platform, where the driver will be tested.

The HLK certification process itself requires a lot of resources to be performed. This step is curiously not in their development cycle! Matthew van Eerde (Microsoft Audio developer and moderator on wdmaudiodev mailing list) told us he never tried the HLK certification process and the two developers in charge of the SYSVAD (Girish Pattabiraman & Adonais Romero Gonzalez) do not validate the SYSVAD with HLK Studio. Then we tried to get a Microsoft contact knowing about this problem (our message on Github and Microsoft social forum got no reply). We built a minimal and truly functional example of the SYSVAD audio driver, and the HLK certification process failed anyway. We thought it could explain why it does not pass all certification tests, but no. This official audio driver example is programmed like a serial driver instead of an audio driver, the clock is bad and the audio timer implementation is wrong. On our side we spent the year 2018 to make different functional virtual audio drivers based on SYSVAD example. Consequently it is not really possible to release a product with this new audio driver model for WIN10 architecture. The reason why is simple: the HLK certification process does not work with audio drivers, even the official Audio Driver example provided by Microsoft! The SYSVAD audio driver does not pass all certification tests and is even not validated on the functional level.

But this new driver architecture is not really used by audio industry, because not validated, then Window 10 is still running in under-performing mode. With Windows 10, Microsoft introduced new driver architecture with a certification process to test, validate and sign drivers as a mandatory condition to install it on WIN10 and Windows Server 2016.

Virtual audio driver for windows 10