Quite some time back I wrote a blog entry on how to make conditional breakpoints. In particular, I was looking for a way to find when a certain pool tag allocation occurred. Well it turns out there is a MUCH better way of doing it that what I posted in that blog entry.

The latest issue of “The NT Insider” from OSR just came out, and has an article on debugging techniques. Apparently there is a global value that you can set to a given pool tag that you would like to break on allocation for. So if I were looking for the tag ‘Test’ I could set the following value in the debugger:

kd> ed nt!PoolHitTag 'tseT'

Note that this technique will only work if pool tagging is enabled on the system. But nevertheless, this technique is a lot more efficient and faster than the method I showed previously. (Although the technique could still be good for other scenarios.)