Kernel Exports Added for Windows Server 2003 SP1

The table below lists the 50 functions that are first exported by the Windows kernel in the version 5.2 from Windows Server 2003 SP1. Two more are listed as additions for Windows XP SP3 because the latter has the lower version number. All these added functions are still exported as of version 10.0, except that one was discontinued in 6.3. These additions represent by far the largest expansion of the kernel’s exported functionality for any service-pack release in the history of Windows. Indeed, more functions were added for Windows Server 2003 SP1 than for the original Windows Server 2003. An explanation is that this is the first Windows version (known to this study) that has an x64 build. Many of the new functions are exported only from x64 builds.

Documentation status is summarised by colour coding so that more detail can be given as Remarks with less text. Functions that have their own non-trivial documentation are shown with no background colour. If the function is documented as reserved or obsolete, with or without a prototype, it is shaded red or shaded grey, respectively. An undocumented function that is at least declared in one or another header file from the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) is shaded orange. If the only declaration that Microsoft is known to have disclosed publicly is from the “minwin” directory of the Enterprise WDK for Windows 10 version 1511, specifically, then the function is highlighted orange. Functions that appear to be completely undocumented are highlighted yellow. If a function is documented now but is known not to have been documented in the first contemporaneous Device Driver Kit (DDK), WDK or Installable File System (IFS) Kit, then it is shaded yellow to retain some of its previous status as undocumented.

Barely a quarter of the new functions are documented. For only a few does the documentation state the applicable versions as beginning with Windows Server 2003 SP1 specifically. Unusually, one function that is documented is not declared in any WDK header file. Another half of the functions are not documented but do at least get declared in one or another WDK header file. Declarations, both of these and the documented functions, are mostly for Windows Server 2003 SP1 and higher, but some have no version constraint at all, and one dates the function to Windows XP.