11 ms·

how does winndows resolve these issues?

tyingq 5y ago
I had to disable "Fast Startup" in Windows because it would make WSL lose its mind. So whatever they are doing, it has issues as well.
- tffgg 5y ago
  Wsl1 wsl2 - No issue with fast startup, sleep or hibernation
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Sure, though it's not just me. Plenty of issues in the WSL github repo and results from Google.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Similar experience, except there is a time of day drift issue that afflicts docker. It's a single magic powershell command to fix, once you Google the error and find the right SO article.
- danieldk 5y ago
  Here, the trackpad is broken after fastboot 1/2 times (basically registers button presses all the time, making it unusable). Without fastboot no such issues, plus modern machines boot fast even without fastboot ;).
jodoherty 5y ago
Most hardware device vendors write Windows drivers and test them. Since they built the hardware, the vendor driver developers are privy to all the internals. Windows also has a stable ABI for drivers. Hardware device vendors don't always write or maintain Linux drivers there's no stable driver ABI for binary drivers to be built and distributed for Linux. Instead, vendors are encouraged to write drivers that follow the conventions of the Linux kernel with no hardware abstraction layers and submit them for inclusion in the upstream Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Not every vendor is willing to do that (NVIDIA for example), but some do (AMD, Intel).
- pharmakom 5y ago
  I’m wondering if a clever solution of presenting the Windows ABI to drivers but translating to Linux calls under the hood would be feasible?
  - keanebean86 5y ago
    AMD tried something similar and the Kernel maintainers rejected the patch. At least that's how I understood it. I think this is a HN post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142285
  - voxadam 5y ago
    Sounds a lot like NDISwrapper.[1] God, that was a pain in the ass. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      I don't miss that. But it was better than the alternative at the time... "Ok, there are at least three versions of the Linksco WG8211, all with different wireless chipsets. The box is identical except for the UPC sub-label - you want the one ending in -02. Some of the -01 boxes might work, but no guarantees, and the -03 definitely doesn't have support yet. You can't tell by the PCI ID, but if you poke this particular register, you can get the sub-version, which should tell you which chipset they're using - if they haven't changed it again." Wireless cards on Linux, back in the early days of 802.11, were brutal to get working properly, mostly due to lack of drivers. The NDISwrapper was gross and sometimes hard to configure, but it also meant you had a snowball's chance in hell of getting a random wireless adapter working on Linux.
  - jodoherty 5y ago
    It is, but the point of not defining a Linux ABI is to avoid proprietary, binary blob drivers and instead force drivers to exist in the upstream Linux kernel where they can be maintained by the kernel developers and freely distributed. This has a lot of advantages of this approach over binary drivers in that: - The driver can be updated so it survives architectural changes (say from x86 -> amd64 -> armv7 -> aarch64 -> riscv). - The kernel can be changed freely without worrying about supporting drivers that cannot be updated because they only exist as binaries. - Bugs in the drivers can be identified and fixed by anyone (most importantly, critical security bugs). Also, good ABIs are hard to get right. Windows had to completely rewrite their audio subsystem and the associated driver interfaces around the time of Vista to get low-latency right, for example. But that said, the use of binary blobs exists even today (CPU microcode, various driver firmware blobs that people don't have time to reverse engineer, etc.). Someone else also mentioned ndiswrapper, which reimplements the binary interface for supporting Windows network drivers on Linux. So you can pick any Windows driver interface and write a Linux kernel module or a combination of a kernel module and some userspace framework that can host and utilize that driver. You might have to emulate or paravirtualize some hardware access or instructions to avoid causing conflicts, but there's nothing technical stopping you, other than it just being hard. It can also never be included in the upstream Linux kernel for the ideological reasons I already mentioned.
gvb 5y ago
Delegated and distributed responsibility. Windows makes the hardware vendors implement it in the their device drivers, and the "system integrator" (laptop manufacturer) is responsible to verify that it works. The laptop manufactures (a) have a limited and known set of hardware to verify works and (b) have "leverage" (i.e. promises to purchase large quantities of peripherals) to ensure the hardware vendors fix any problems found. Linux drivers don't get much hardware vendor love.
noen 5y ago
It doesn't, really. Hibernation and even the levels of "sleep" mode have and still have issues in Windows. I have a brand new Dell Precision workstation that still can't properly come back from sleep mode every time.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yep. I have a Surface for work. It just reboots when you tell it to hibernate or even sleep.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I haven’t had any issues with hibernating or sleep on windows with any device I’ve owned. But damn the number of issues I have on linux in 2021 outweighs the amount I’ve had on Windows, ever. Still prefer linux over windows tho.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Heh, as I've posted above, I've had the reverse. All kinds of weird broken behavior on Windows, everything works perfectly on Linux. And those are mostly highly-integrated, full-intel computers. I have a small HP with a thunderbolt / usb-c port. Thunderbolt kinda sorta works. Sometimes. But even if the display goes to sleep, it's game over. I also have a usb-c monitor. I've only ever seen it work one (1) time in windows. On linux it mostly works. Sometimes it doesn't detect the correct refresh rate for some reason. But in the BIOS it always works. I could actually even install Windows with it. And it sometimes gets to the login page. But once the session launches, it turns off.
  - salawat 5y ago
    You've never had games that would only start and run without crashing from a clean boot? That's part of where the whole "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" piece of wisdom comes in. You never know what might have flipped out from under agter a hibernate. When you turn it Off off. You know. Unless...you dual boot linux. I have an Envy 47 something whose wireless still can't get it right. So I just ran an ethernet cable to it. Traced it down to being because Ubuntu wouldn't clean out the hardware registers between hot reboots. It would be fine after a cold shutdown, but once the card got stuck in a bad state, not even a switch to windows could save you. I'd have to pull the plug to get all the registers clear, and start anew. And that was how I learned it's never the hardware until it is.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
My windows think pad has had a super buggy hibernation for a few years. Better than Linux laptops I’ve tried, but still not at all solved. Only my mac seems to get hibernation right.
- aksss 5y ago
  Closed hardware platform, no coincidence there.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  I don't believe the latest version of macOS supports Hibernation anymore. At least I couldn't get it working with an hour or two of finagling/googling around.
ajross 5y ago
They make it the OEM's responsibility. The board integrator tests hibernate, sees that it fails, checks the docs, eventually figures out that it's the driver for (just to invent a random example) their oddball audio codec forgetting to reset the RST_OR_BADSTUFF register on hardware reset, so it starts pushing bad data at the hardware DMA controller which confuses the media stack. The board vendor knows what they put on the board, they have support from the suppliers, etc... So it's a tractable problem for them even if the solutions are often ugly ad hoc hackery. The community has none of that. They need to figure out all this stuff by reverse engineering in most cases. But the point is it's not an "OS" problem. "Windows" doesn't do anything different from Linux. The difference is that if you ship hardware and people only pay for windows, then you only make windows work.
bbulkow 5y ago
As others have said, essentially by being the single os for a multibillion dollar pc industry for decades. I forget exactly when the hibernate api came online... 90's?... and Microsoft has a porting layer test suite as a manufacturer that you have to pass to get that little windows stamp. All done by paid professionals and spread over the cost of the large number of pcs sold. The hal (hardware abstraction layer) is always a hard problem that takes years to get right. Write the code, write the tests, fix insane little bugs, get market momentum. Once it is solved it kinda runs itself and is a massive moat. (Apple tried this... 95? StarTrek project, os 8?) This collection of issues is why i run windows as a host os and above that run wsl (far better than mac's weird port of bsd + homebrew), local vms, and cloud servers. Unless you want to talk about the difficulty that is high dpi monitors? That has taken 5 years for 'the windows community' to shake out and i don't think linux ever will. Windows is the best solution right now for this very important problem, unless you like fuzzy text fonts. I am not a windows fanboi. Far from it. I have all the ecosystems in my house, and have professionally gone back and forth as the winds have shifted. It is amazing to me that windows has come back, credit vmware, docker, wsl, and microsoft's new openness to being a sensible first stop for developers.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
Meh. For what it's worth, Windows doesn't always do this right either. In my particular case, I have a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 mini (a small form-factor desktop) that sleeps, hibernates, etc perfectly on linux. Worked ever since it was brand new. On windows, for some reason, it randomly turns on at night. I've tried deactivating pretty much all I could, including the option to wake up to install updates (and I usually install the updates fairly quickly anyway). This also happens on an older custom-built PC. Random screen problems (AMD RX card) and / or previously unused USB ports don't work. Everything goes back to normal after a reboot. As this computer doesn't have a TPM, bonus points for the screen turning on bright blue in the middle of the night for bitlocker unlock. Linux sleeps and hibernates perfectly on all my PCs (all some form of HP elitedesk or probook - I haven't tried those on the custom-built PC).
- c0nsumer 5y ago
  'powercfg /lastwake' (in Windows) will tell what woke it up.
- passivate 5y ago
  I haven't had an issue with hibernation on W10. Its likely that you have third-party software/drivers installed that are messing up the OS. Have you tried to troubleshoot?
sigg3 5y ago
In my experience, it doesn't. Hibernation is a hit and miss on Windows too, just less so.
tinus_hn 5y ago
With Windows 10 shutdown means hibernate so if it’s flakey you’ll crash every time. Also if you don’t implement it or you implement it poorly and you’re not the size of Nvidia your drivers will not pass the checks and will not be signed, so your customers won’t be able to load them.
_trampeltier 5y ago
Even windows has sometimes troubles with it. On work with my HP ZBook and the HP Docking Station I had many, many crashes and bluescreens allways, when I the external monitors felt asleep. Now, no monitors goes blank ever and since then everything works fine.
m463 5y ago
Pay people to fix these i-hate-my-life bugs. I've seen companies run shelves full of sleep-wake machines. sleeping and waking. sleeping and... yawn... waking.

I had to disable "Fast Startup" in Windows because it would make WSL lose its mind. So whatever they are doing, it has issues as well.

tffgg 5y ago
Wsl1 wsl2 - No issue with fast startup, sleep or hibernation
- tyingq 5y ago
  Sure, though it's not just me. Plenty of issues in the WSL github repo and results from Google.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Similar experience, except there is a time of day drift issue that afflicts docker. It's a single magic powershell command to fix, once you Google the error and find the right SO article.
danieldk 5y ago
Here, the trackpad is broken after fastboot 1/2 times (basically registers button presses all the time, making it unusable). Without fastboot no such issues, plus modern machines boot fast even without fastboot ;).

jodoherty 5y ago

Most hardware device vendors write Windows drivers and test them. Since they built the hardware, the vendor driver developers are privy to all the internals. Windows also has a stable ABI for drivers. Hardware device vendors don't always write or maintain Linux drivers there's no stable driver ABI for binary drivers to be built and distributed for Linux. Instead, vendors are encouraged to write drivers that follow the conventions of the Linux kernel with no hardware abstraction layers and submit them for inclusion in the upstream Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Not every vendor is willing to do that (NVIDIA for example), but some do (AMD, Intel).

pharmakom 5y ago
I’m wondering if a clever solution of presenting the Windows ABI to drivers but translating to Linux calls under the hood would be feasible?
- keanebean86 5y ago
  AMD tried something similar and the Kernel maintainers rejected the patch. At least that's how I understood it. I think this is a HN post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142285
- voxadam 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like NDISwrapper.[1] God, that was a pain in the ass. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I don't miss that. But it was better than the alternative at the time... "Ok, there are at least three versions of the Linksco WG8211, all with different wireless chipsets. The box is identical except for the UPC sub-label - you want the one ending in -02. Some of the -01 boxes might work, but no guarantees, and the -03 definitely doesn't have support yet. You can't tell by the PCI ID, but if you poke this particular register, you can get the sub-version, which should tell you which chipset they're using - if they haven't changed it again." Wireless cards on Linux, back in the early days of 802.11, were brutal to get working properly, mostly due to lack of drivers. The NDISwrapper was gross and sometimes hard to configure, but it also meant you had a snowball's chance in hell of getting a random wireless adapter working on Linux.
- jodoherty 5y ago
  It is, but the point of not defining a Linux ABI is to avoid proprietary, binary blob drivers and instead force drivers to exist in the upstream Linux kernel where they can be maintained by the kernel developers and freely distributed. This has a lot of advantages of this approach over binary drivers in that: - The driver can be updated so it survives architectural changes (say from x86 -> amd64 -> armv7 -> aarch64 -> riscv). - The kernel can be changed freely without worrying about supporting drivers that cannot be updated because they only exist as binaries. - Bugs in the drivers can be identified and fixed by anyone (most importantly, critical security bugs). Also, good ABIs are hard to get right. Windows had to completely rewrite their audio subsystem and the associated driver interfaces around the time of Vista to get low-latency right, for example. But that said, the use of binary blobs exists even today (CPU microcode, various driver firmware blobs that people don't have time to reverse engineer, etc.). Someone else also mentioned ndiswrapper, which reimplements the binary interface for supporting Windows network drivers on Linux. So you can pick any Windows driver interface and write a Linux kernel module or a combination of a kernel module and some userspace framework that can host and utilize that driver. You might have to emulate or paravirtualize some hardware access or instructions to avoid causing conflicts, but there's nothing technical stopping you, other than it just being hard. It can also never be included in the upstream Linux kernel for the ideological reasons I already mentioned.

gvb 5y ago

Delegated and distributed responsibility. Windows makes the hardware vendors implement it in the their device drivers, and the "system integrator" (laptop manufacturer) is responsible to verify that it works. The laptop manufactures (a) have a limited and known set of hardware to verify works and (b) have "leverage" (i.e. promises to purchase large quantities of peripherals) to ensure the hardware vendors fix any problems found. Linux drivers don't get much hardware vendor love.

noen 5y ago

It doesn't, really. Hibernation and even the levels of "sleep" mode have and still have issues in Windows. I have a brand new Dell Precision workstation that still can't properly come back from sleep mode every time.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Yep. I have a Surface for work. It just reboots when you tell it to hibernate or even sleep.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I haven’t had any issues with hibernating or sleep on windows with any device I’ve owned. But damn the number of issues I have on linux in 2021 outweighs the amount I’ve had on Windows, ever. Still prefer linux over windows tho.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Heh, as I've posted above, I've had the reverse. All kinds of weird broken behavior on Windows, everything works perfectly on Linux. And those are mostly highly-integrated, full-intel computers. I have a small HP with a thunderbolt / usb-c port. Thunderbolt kinda sorta works. Sometimes. But even if the display goes to sleep, it's game over. I also have a usb-c monitor. I've only ever seen it work one (1) time in windows. On linux it mostly works. Sometimes it doesn't detect the correct refresh rate for some reason. But in the BIOS it always works. I could actually even install Windows with it. And it sometimes gets to the login page. But once the session launches, it turns off.
- salawat 5y ago
  You've never had games that would only start and run without crashing from a clean boot? That's part of where the whole "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" piece of wisdom comes in. You never know what might have flipped out from under agter a hibernate. When you turn it Off off. You know. Unless...you dual boot linux. I have an Envy 47 something whose wireless still can't get it right. So I just ran an ethernet cable to it. Traced it down to being because Ubuntu wouldn't clean out the hardware registers between hot reboots. It would be fine after a cold shutdown, but once the card got stuck in a bad state, not even a switch to windows could save you. I'd have to pull the plug to get all the registers clear, and start anew. And that was how I learned it's never the hardware until it is.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

My windows think pad has had a super buggy hibernation for a few years. Better than Linux laptops I’ve tried, but still not at all solved. Only my mac seems to get hibernation right.

aksss 5y ago
Closed hardware platform, no coincidence there.
ghshephard 5y ago
I don't believe the latest version of macOS supports Hibernation anymore. At least I couldn't get it working with an hour or two of finagling/googling around.

ajross 5y ago

They make it the OEM's responsibility. The board integrator tests hibernate, sees that it fails, checks the docs, eventually figures out that it's the driver for (just to invent a random example) their oddball audio codec forgetting to reset the RST_OR_BADSTUFF register on hardware reset, so it starts pushing bad data at the hardware DMA controller which confuses the media stack. The board vendor knows what they put on the board, they have support from the suppliers, etc... So it's a tractable problem for them even if the solutions are often ugly ad hoc hackery. The community has none of that. They need to figure out all this stuff by reverse engineering in most cases. But the point is it's not an "OS" problem. "Windows" doesn't do anything different from Linux. The difference is that if you ship hardware and people only pay for windows, then you only make windows work.

bbulkow 5y ago

As others have said, essentially by being the single os for a multibillion dollar pc industry for decades. I forget exactly when the hibernate api came online... 90's?... and Microsoft has a porting layer test suite as a manufacturer that you have to pass to get that little windows stamp. All done by paid professionals and spread over the cost of the large number of pcs sold. The hal (hardware abstraction layer) is always a hard problem that takes years to get right. Write the code, write the tests, fix insane little bugs, get market momentum. Once it is solved it kinda runs itself and is a massive moat. (Apple tried this... 95? StarTrek project, os 8?) This collection of issues is why i run windows as a host os and above that run wsl (far better than mac's weird port of bsd + homebrew), local vms, and cloud servers. Unless you want to talk about the difficulty that is high dpi monitors? That has taken 5 years for 'the windows community' to shake out and i don't think linux ever will. Windows is the best solution right now for this very important problem, unless you like fuzzy text fonts. I am not a windows fanboi. Far from it. I have all the ecosystems in my house, and have professionally gone back and forth as the winds have shifted. It is amazing to me that windows has come back, credit vmware, docker, wsl, and microsoft's new openness to being a sensible first stop for developers.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

Meh. For what it's worth, Windows doesn't always do this right either. In my particular case, I have a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 mini (a small form-factor desktop) that sleeps, hibernates, etc perfectly on linux. Worked ever since it was brand new. On windows, for some reason, it randomly turns on at night. I've tried deactivating pretty much all I could, including the option to wake up to install updates (and I usually install the updates fairly quickly anyway). This also happens on an older custom-built PC. Random screen problems (AMD RX card) and / or previously unused USB ports don't work. Everything goes back to normal after a reboot. As this computer doesn't have a TPM, bonus points for the screen turning on bright blue in the middle of the night for bitlocker unlock. Linux sleeps and hibernates perfectly on all my PCs (all some form of HP elitedesk or probook - I haven't tried those on the custom-built PC).

c0nsumer 5y ago
'powercfg /lastwake' (in Windows) will tell what woke it up.
passivate 5y ago
I haven't had an issue with hibernation on W10. Its likely that you have third-party software/drivers installed that are messing up the OS. Have you tried to troubleshoot?

sigg3 5y ago

In my experience, it doesn't. Hibernation is a hit and miss on Windows too, just less so.

tinus_hn 5y ago

With Windows 10 shutdown means hibernate so if it’s flakey you’ll crash every time. Also if you don’t implement it or you implement it poorly and you’re not the size of Nvidia your drivers will not pass the checks and will not be signed, so your customers won’t be able to load them.

_trampeltier 5y ago

Even windows has sometimes troubles with it. On work with my HP ZBook and the HP Docking Station I had many, many crashes and bluescreens allways, when I the external monitors felt asleep. Now, no monitors goes blank ever and since then everything works fine.

m463 5y ago

Pay people to fix these i-hate-my-life bugs. I've seen companies run shelves full of sleep-wake machines. sleeping and waking. sleeping and... yawn... waking.