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Intel removed EHCI support for USB in it's chips with Skylake in favor of xHCI. This has been a long time coming and not a malicious or insidious act. Windows
by cptskippy 10y ago
Intel removed EHCI support for USB in it's chips with Skylake in favor of xHCI. This has been a long time coming and not a malicious or insidious act. Windows 7 doesn't natively have XHCI support and Microsoft isn't adding features to Windows 7. So, on Skylake, you can't install Windows 7 via USB and you can't use a USB keyboard or mouse during installation because the USB drivers are incompatible.
I suspect there are many other incompatibilities that exist and Microsoft has just drawn a line in the sand.
Hardware and software don't always evolve in lockstep. Sometimes new hardware arrives that breaks something or it doesn't keep up with the evolution of software. Microsoft has taken somewhat bizarre actions in the past to correct this situation when it happens.
In the 90s just a year after Windows 95 was launched you saw USB, AGP, UDMA, PCI and other hardware advances come to market. Windows 95 supported none of it. They released Windows 95 OSR2 to OEMs to add support for all the new hardware. Windows 98 was a long way out and they needed to take action to support new hardware or face being displaced in the market.
With all of the hardware advances of the late 90s and the rapid decline of the 16bit CPU, ISA, and a lot of other legacy systems, Microsoft wanted to make a clean break in the 00s. Windows XP wasn't going to support any of the old cruft of the 80s and early 90s. The problem was that in the years leading up to XP, OEMs refused to start shipping PCs that met the minimum requirements. They were still shipping with legacy hardware that wasn't compatible. So Microsoft stopped shipping Windows 98 and instead replaced it with the crap fest known as Windows ME. WinME was a rebranded Win98 with one key difference, it had all of the "legacy" drivers removed giving it the same minimum specs as WinXP. Unfortunately some of that legacy was so ingrained that WinME was incredibly unstable.
- agumonkey 10y agoNo way to add/override driver on pre-install stage ? (memories of 2K era setups)
- 4ad 10y agoYes, you can still add drivers, however, someone (Intel probably) would have to release those drivers for Windows 7. If they are built for Windows 10 and use Windows 10 kernel-mode APIs, they won't work on Windows 7. However, I don't think Intel won't build drivers for Windows 7. It's against their own interest. Intel just wants to sell hardware.
- agumonkey 10y agoI was thinking of a non corporate effort, maybe some people from the linux world. I don't think Intel cares because they surely have ties with MS ensure Win10 on Kaby Lake boxes.
- 4ad 10y agoIn today's mobile world I'd guess most Kaby Lake boxes are sold to enterprise customers, who care a lot about Windows 7. It's just a guess though. Porting/using as reference Linux drivers (a lot of which are written by Intel people anyway) to Windows just doesn't seem to happen very often. Technical difficulty aside, which is significant (I've written both Windows and Unix (although not Linux) kernel mode drivers for years), nobody seems to care about such things, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
- walterbell 10y agoOne option could be running Linux as the host operating system on Kaby Lake hardware, then running Windows 7 in a VM where drivers would mainly need to support virtual hardware. CPU/microcode compatibility may still be an issue.
- rbanffy 10y ago> then running Windows 7 in a VM With the added benefit of being able to run on immutable disk images or to roll them back to safe states in case some malware decides to take residence.
- cptskippy 10y agoMy mom works for a health insurance company and all of their machines boot off immutable network images. The only downside seems to be longer boot times and immutable desktop icons.
- agumonkey 10y agoLots of enterprises end up in this situation. Tax office had Windows machine only to run an AS400 terminal emulator.
- bitL 10y agoxHCI is a non-issue, Intel even provides an official tool to patch Win 7 images to enable USB3 support during install [1] The main issue is processor errata and architectural oddities that need to be fixed in the kernel itself, such as problematic (buggy) instructions or unexpected behavior in the scheduler (e.g. moving execution from core to hyperthreaded core), deep sleep states. If those bugs aren't fixed, users might experience random freezes/reboots or even being unable to boot. [1] https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25476/Windows-7-USB-3-0-Creator-Utility https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25476/Windows-7-US...