LiveKd 5.0 for Hyper-V Debugging Released to Windows Sysinternals

 One of the tools included in the Windows Sysinternals suite has suffered a consistent upgrade in the latest update introduced to the package of tools developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell.

Some IT professionals are undoubtedly well aware of the LiveKd, and its associated functionality. By leveraging the tool administrators can take advantage of the Kd and Windbg Microsoft kernel debuggers (the same as in the Debugging Tools for Windows), but they can do so on any live system, by running them locally.

Essentially, LiveKd 5.0 is designed for troubleshooting virtual machines in scenarios which involve live kernel debugging.

And as the title of this article implies, the latest version of LiveKd enables admins to perform debugging on virtual machines running in Microsoft’s hypervisor technology, Hyper-V.

Russinovich revealed that version 5.0 of LiveKd was inspired by Matthieu Suiche’s LiveCloudKd tool, also designed to permit Hyper-V virtual machine debugging, and that the tool was possible with the contribution of Ken Johnson, formerly Skywing of Uninformed.org.

“Ken had previously contributed some code to LiveKd that enabled it to run on 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems, so working with him was certain to speed the project – little did I know how much,” Russinovich stated.

“He responded that he’d prototyped a tool for live virtual machine debugging a year before and thought he could incorporate it into LiveKd in a few days. Sure enough, a few days later and the beta of LiveKd 5.0 was finished, complete with the Hyper-V live debugging feature.”

However, Russinovich is also encouraging customers to have a look at LiveCloudKd, in addition to using the tool included in Windows Sysinternals.

“We picked this week to publish it to highlight Matthieu’s tool, which offers some capabilities not present in LiveKd,” he explained.

“For example, just like it does for local machine debugging, LiveKd provides a read-only view of the target virtual machine, whereas LiveCloudKd lets you modify it as well.”

The Windows Sysinternals suite is available for download here.