WinNull - Opensource driver for Windows

WinNull is an experimental Windows driver inspired by Linux /dev/null behavior.
This is an early pre-release version intended for testing and feedback only. The driver is currently unsigned, so Windows must be booted with Driver Signature Enforcement disabled before installation.
Everything you need is included in the README:

• What the project does
• How WinNull works
• Installation instructions
• Usage examples
• Important warnings and limitations

I have personally used this driver for several months without issues, but it still needs broader testing before I submit it for official Microsoft signing.
If you are interested in testing low-level Windows drivers and experimenting with alternative filesystem behaviors, feedback is welcome.

link: https://github.com/jen1-sys/WinNull/releases/download/V1.6/WinNullv1.6.7z

jen1 said:

WinNull is an experimental Windows driver inspired by Linux /dev/null behavior.\null
This is an early pre-release version intended for testing and feedback only. The driver is currently unsigned, so Windows must be booted with Driver Signature Enforcement disabled before installation.
Everything you need is included in the README:

• What the project does
• How WinNull works
• Installation instructions
• Usage examples
• Important warnings and limitations

I have personally used this driver for several months without issues, but it still needs broader testing before I submit it for official Microsoft signing.
If you are interested in testing low-level Windows drivers and experimenting with alternative filesystem behaviors, feedback is welcome.

link: https://github.com/jen1-sys/WinNull/releases/download/V1.6/WinNullv1.6.7z

Click to expand...

What are some actual use cases in normal use?

Back in the day (usenet days) if someone wanted to say that they will ignore comments they would say something like

comments to \dev\null

This simply returns a successful write operation while writing zero bytes to the disk. Any file written to it will immediately return EOF and contain no data.

You can redirect any program whose output you want to discard to a WinNull folder or to a `.wnull` file. If needed, you can also create a symbolic link to it.

The closest comparison is `/dev/null` on Linux. It behaves the same way: write operations succeed, but all data is discarded.

A practical example is Windows kernel crash dumps. When Windows crashes, it may generate dump files that are at least 10 GB, and sometimes 15–20 GB or more. If you do not plan to analyze the dump yourself or submit it to Microsoft for analysis, you can redirect or link the dump output folder to WinNull instead.

Example:

mklink /d C:\Windows\LiveKernelReports C:\WinNull


The dump process will still report success, so the system behaves normally and no errors occur, but none of the dump data is actually written to disk.

You can do the same thing with log folders such as: C:\Windows\Logs

If you want to discard a single file instead of an entire folder, you can use the `.wnull` extension.

This can also be very useful on PCs with low disk space, because unwanted files will consume zero disk space regardless of how much data is written to them

In one sentence: it is basically `/dev/null` for Windows.