Microsoft® Windows® Internals: Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000, 4th Edition

Windows Global Flags

Windows has a set of flags stored in a systemwide global variable named NtGlobalFlag that enable various internal debugging, tracing, and validation support in the operating system. The system variable NtGlobalFlag is initialized from the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager in the value GlobalFlag at system boot time. By default, this registry value is 0, so it's likely that on your systems, you're not using any global flags. In addition, each image has a set of global flags that also turn on internal tracing and validation code (although the bit layout of these flags is entirely different than the systemwide global flags). These flags aren't documented or supported for customer use, but they ...