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It's ambiguous to say "30% of Windows crashes", since the article reports that it's 30% of Windows Vista crashes. And not to be glib, but if your Vista is cras

It's ambiguous to say "30% of Windows crashes", since the article reports that it's 30% of Windows Vista crashes. And not to be glib, but if your Vista is crashing, I'd be more inclined to blame a shoddily made OS than graphics drivers. After all, there is something to be said for the fact that the OS is built such that a bad driver can crash it. Also of note is that the article doesn't say how MS determined that the crashes were nVidia's "fault". If I create an OS that crashes whenever any program writes my competitor's logo to the display buffer, can I blame my competitor's website for "crashing my OS"?

comatose_kid 19y ago
Not to be an MS apologist, but bad drivers can crash any OS. In Linux for example, time critical parts (eg. ISRs) will typically reside in kernel space. So if your driver has some bug (ie, makes a blocking call), you'll crash.
- TheTarquin 19y ago
  Interesting. I guess the point I was getting at (which, on rereading my post didn't really come through at all), is that they seem to be blaiming other software developers without actually defining how they attributed said crashes. Perhaps it's outside the scope of the article, but I'm just a touch dubious of an article in which MS blaims others for their OS crashing. Doubly so when they don't provide much more than a pie chart to back that up.
pmjordan 19y ago
I'd be very interested in seeing how you'd write a graphics driver that doesn't at least have some kernel mode portion. PCIe/AGP memory accesses need to be in terms of physical memory addresses, as mainstream PCs don't have hardware IOMMUs.
- TheTarquin 19y ago
  I'll be the first to admit that the extent of my knowledge of graphics cards and drivers doesn't extend much past how to install them. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that on the dual-boot systems I've used (mostly machines designed for cross-platform testing) Linux and previous versions of Windows (notably XP in its SP 1 iteration), seem WAY more forgiving than Vista and don't crash or recover gracefully in situations where Vista bombs. Admittedly, this is based on personal anecdotes and, as the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
  - pmjordan 19y ago
    Well, my theory is that the problems are caused by the fact that Vista uses 3D acceleration for its Aero Glass UI. Graphics drivers almost never crash in 2D mode in my experience, on both WinXP and Linux. 3D mode tends to be much less robust. Having programmed 3D graphics hardware on the "down to the metal" level in game consoles, I'm not that surprised. GPUs hare hugely complex and tend to have a significant amount of hardware bugs or quirks that can make the developer's life really hard. By the way, I don't use Vista on any of my systems (yet) so I'm just assuming that the reports of instability are accurate.

comatose_kid 19y ago

Not to be an MS apologist, but bad drivers can crash any OS. In Linux for example, time critical parts (eg. ISRs) will typically reside in kernel space. So if your driver has some bug (ie, makes a blocking call), you'll crash.

TheTarquin 19y ago
Interesting. I guess the point I was getting at (which, on rereading my post didn't really come through at all), is that they seem to be blaiming other software developers without actually defining how they attributed said crashes. Perhaps it's outside the scope of the article, but I'm just a touch dubious of an article in which MS blaims others for their OS crashing. Doubly so when they don't provide much more than a pie chart to back that up.

pmjordan 19y ago

I'd be very interested in seeing how you'd write a graphics driver that doesn't at least have some kernel mode portion. PCIe/AGP memory accesses need to be in terms of physical memory addresses, as mainstream PCs don't have hardware IOMMUs.

TheTarquin 19y ago
I'll be the first to admit that the extent of my knowledge of graphics cards and drivers doesn't extend much past how to install them. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that on the dual-boot systems I've used (mostly machines designed for cross-platform testing) Linux and previous versions of Windows (notably XP in its SP 1 iteration), seem WAY more forgiving than Vista and don't crash or recover gracefully in situations where Vista bombs. Admittedly, this is based on personal anecdotes and, as the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
- pmjordan 19y ago
  Well, my theory is that the problems are caused by the fact that Vista uses 3D acceleration for its Aero Glass UI. Graphics drivers almost never crash in 2D mode in my experience, on both WinXP and Linux. 3D mode tends to be much less robust. Having programmed 3D graphics hardware on the "down to the metal" level in game consoles, I'm not that surprised. GPUs hare hugely complex and tend to have a significant amount of hardware bugs or quirks that can make the developer's life really hard. By the way, I don't use Vista on any of my systems (yet) so I'm just assuming that the reports of instability are accurate.