3 ms·

I'm under the impression that in the 90s, a lot of Blue Screen of Death errors in Windows 9x were caused by poorly written drivers.

by cbhl 11y ago

agumonkey 11y ago
And lack of tooling and lack of OS design. With NT they had actual isolation to allow local crashes, and MS has the static checker to ensure a level of quality to reduce said crashes.
- derefr 11y ago
  Windows 3.1 had a VMM that could have isolated drivers just fine. But the drivers that people needed to run were DOS drivers that were shoddily written with precisely-controllable (i.e. non-virtualizable) interrupts in mind. "Consumer" Windows couldn't get around the fact that they had to support hardware that came with crap drivers. The reason NT worked so well was that it targeted an extremely reduced machine profile in the form of "workstations", where Microsoft could write all the drivers themselves. It took Microsoft until XP to actually be able to stop supporting the old crap VXDs and just force all the hardware manufacturers to "write a new driver or else". That they then also instituted the WHQL program to certify those drivers—and later added tooling to make that certifying job more rigorous—was just icing. It was moving away from VXD drivers that solved most of the problem.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    So because of social pressure, from 3.1 to Me, Windows had to cave down to VxD model shipped by manufacturers even though they had an adequate layer in place ? that is .. something.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Not social pressure; rather, Microsoft's continued revenue stream depending on an implicit guarantee of upgrades not breaking backward compatibility, even when what "broke" was an invalid assumption about undocumented APIs made by a third-party. To consumers, it all looks like "Windows broke the app." See also, everything Raymond Chen has ever written. For example: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41363 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=...
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        You get something of the same with the "do not break user space" policy that Torvalds is holding the kernel devs to. Just wish that the user space libs would adopt the same policy, rather than try to paper over it by stuffing everything into containers (liable to turn into the Linux equivalent of DLL hell).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

I'm under the impression that in the 90s, a lot of Blue Screen of Death errors in Windows 9x were caused by poorly written drivers.

by cbhl 11y ago

I'm under the impression that in the 90s, a lot of Blue Screen of Death errors in Windows 9x were caused by poorly written drivers.

agumonkey 11y ago

And lack of tooling and lack of OS design. With NT they had actual isolation to allow local crashes, and MS has the static checker to ensure a level of quality to reduce said crashes.

derefr 11y ago
Windows 3.1 had a VMM that could have isolated drivers just fine. But the drivers that people needed to run were DOS drivers that were shoddily written with precisely-controllable (i.e. non-virtualizable) interrupts in mind. "Consumer" Windows couldn't get around the fact that they had to support hardware that came with crap drivers. The reason NT worked so well was that it targeted an extremely reduced machine profile in the form of "workstations", where Microsoft could write all the drivers themselves. It took Microsoft until XP to actually be able to stop supporting the old crap VXDs and just force all the hardware manufacturers to "write a new driver or else". That they then also instituted the WHQL program to certify those drivers—and later added tooling to make that certifying job more rigorous—was just icing. It was moving away from VXD drivers that solved most of the problem.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  So because of social pressure, from 3.1 to Me, Windows had to cave down to VxD model shipped by manufacturers even though they had an adequate layer in place ? that is .. something.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Not social pressure; rather, Microsoft's continued revenue stream depending on an implicit guarantee of upgrades not breaking backward compatibility, even when what "broke" was an invalid assumption about undocumented APIs made by a third-party. To consumers, it all looks like "Windows broke the app." See also, everything Raymond Chen has ever written. For example: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=41363 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031224-00/?p=...
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      You get something of the same with the "do not break user space" policy that Torvalds is holding the kernel devs to. Just wish that the user space libs would adopt the same policy, rather than try to paper over it by stuffing everything into containers (liable to turn into the Linux equivalent of DLL hell).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]