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> Printer drivers haven't run in the kernel since NT 4.0. I wish that's true, and the APIs are there (and should be used!), but except for incompetence I don't

> Printer drivers haven't run in the kernel since NT 4.0. I wish that's true, and the APIs are there (and should be used!), but except for incompetence I don't know how some drivers still have that kernel-side code (unless DRM? And if it is, why?) I even thought that the 64-bit and Vista driver reset have banished kernel-level drivers, but in the past 6 months I still see printer drivers with kernel-level components. I just scratch my head why? (Some of them are for PCI (yes, not a typo) connector, which is reasonable but weird for a printer. Others are running to printer port and USB but the kernel-level components are still there, active according to Device Manager).

cogman10 5y ago
Oh I can tell you exactly why, particularly because I've worked with a bunch of ex HP printer devs. "Hey we should upgrade to the latest standards!" "Why?" "Because they are safer!" "Yeah, but it might break things" "But it's safer!" "Yeah, but the current shit is working. Don't mess with a working thing". It's practically a religion there. I interned there years ago, it was a momentous task getting internal people to move from IE 7 to firefox, chrome, or IE8. What I'd done was improve one of their internal tools with an updated javascript library. However, it ran like ass on IE 7 and perfectly fine on pretty much everything else.