5 ms·

Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist

85 points by josephcsible 7mo ago

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
I mentioned this in the Scott Hanselmen trying to re-allow local-accounts for Windows thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498494 It just seems so beyond-belief that Microsoft keeps having such depraved anti-consumer behavior. Maybe perhaps this was just a not-ready-yet feature folks had enabled being moved around or shuffled. But it seems just as likely Microsoft intends to keep consumers using a decade and a half years old shitty NVMe-downcast-to-SCSI layer indefinitely, to upsell folks to fancier Windows versions or gaming systems. Microsoft intends to keep Windows consumer disk access slow and bad. As a seasoned Linux veteran & believer, it's somewhat against my interest to share this view, to try to arouse the slumbering behemoth to action. Microsoft not getting the message and doing great misservice to their users is somewhat in my interest. The status quo of Linux being far better at everything is great: gaming is already much faster on Linux, & that should be no surprise, and disk io too. Just holding my tongue and letting Microsoft make a fool for themselves with absymal performance would be ideal. But I also believe in competition, and Linux is going to start slacking off if Microsoft can't be arsed to update a disk io subsystem that was a filthy pitiful hack when they slammed it into service a dozen years ago. We all need some pressure sometimes to get off our hinds, wake the frak up, and pay some attention. And perhaps, maybe: even Windows users don't deserve this malpractice.
- anakaine 7mo ago
  Honestly, who cares if it wasn't ready. It was shipped, available, and required active screwing around by hobbyists to make active. If something goes wrong, thats not on Microsoft - its not an advertised feature. Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes. Its inane that they still rely on scsi downcast, however.
  - karlgkk 7mo ago
    > Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes. Or they believe that it has serious issues in a consumer SKU or consumer application.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  There is no Linux gaming without Proton, being feed from Windows games, developed on Windows, by Windows developers that will put up with this issues, because they still see no value on targeting Linux natively, and couldn't care less. Linux might finally take off on the desktop if the normies that get Windows laptops and gaming rigs at Media Market and similar chains, finally get to them with Linux pre-installed. Otherwise there will be a few HN folks getting them from System 76 and Tuxedo, Dell online store, and that is about it.
  - coffeeling 7mo ago
    The fucked up thing is Windows is the most stable Linux environment to build against. Linux overall relies far too much on the idea that the software is either actively maintained, or open source and can be recompiled for new systems.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      I see an advantage of finally having the Year of Desktop Linux, given the current geopolitics. However until we start seeing those systems being sold on regular stores, with normies distros, it will always be as has been all over these years. The "everyone is going to migrate to Linux" meme keeps coming up since Windows XP Toy's R us UI, however here we are, Steam Hardware survey 2.20% after two decades, since XP.
  - raxxorraxor 7mo ago
    Proton serves as a target for now. You cannot have a target that is Linux like you have with Windows, you would have to target different distributions where users are additionally fragmented. Sadly, people getting notebooks in the first place become much rarer. I have seen gen alpha developers that want to start with tablet and smartphone. They don't even know that they are prisoners, just like us and our economic system.
andrewstuart 7mo ago
“NVME?? What’s NVME got to do with anything? It’s the Task Bar! For goodness sake can’t you see Windows users have lost faith because they can’t move the task bar!” (Heard in meetings all over Microsoft campus recently).
- saidnooneever 7mo ago
  and then they all break out into song and dance. If you reaaaly dont liiike it, dun dudun dun! Lock the taskbar. lock the taskbar! (ref: z0r . de / 2090)
  - DiabloD3 7mo ago
    Man, I love 20+ year old memes. The early Internet was a better place.
nicman23 7mo ago
holy fuck, imagine segregating your customers' block layer
ezoe 7mo ago
> The native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys) replaces the legacy storage path that has routed NVMe commands through a SCSI translation layer since before NVMe SSDs existed. What? What are Microsoft doing for a decade after NVMe available to consumer grade motherboard?
- kelnos 7mo ago
  Seriously, that was my thought too. Even if we were to stretch credibility and suggest that general consumers don't care about this sort of thing, they just released this for Windows Server in the past year? Windows really is a toy of an OS. It continues to blow my mind that people want to use it as a server OS.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Because it offers VMS niceties that UNIX clones still doesn't do, and stuff like AD, SMB, without manually going through configuration files stored somewhere, that differ across UNIX flavours. Although I do conceed UNIX has won the server room and Windows Servers are mostly about AD, SMB, IIS, Sharepoint, Dynamics, SQL Server. Naturally some of those can be outsourced into Azure services that Microsoft will gladly provide.
    - ch_123 7mo ago
      Which VMS niceties does it offer?
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI. Not being an OS from C to C as the main programming model. And then on top, multiple levels of sandboxing, including virtualization of drivers and kernel modules. Ah and RDP is much nicer than X Windows or VNC.
        jmalicki 7mo ago
kuschku 7mo ago
Supposedly it requires additional workarounds to run in safe mode, and doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller (whether that's in use or not). I also wonder whether this feature will be locked to server and the little-known "pro for workstations" variants.
- karlgkk 7mo ago
  > doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller well that makes perfect sense, if its a consumer or prosumer grade raid controller, to be honest.
materialpoint 7mo ago
If AI was truly profitable Microsoft wouldn't need to cover their expenses at every other corner.
- M95D 7mo ago
  That's not how management works. The expenses will be reduced and profit increased by any means, all the time, forever, no matter how much profitable a company already is.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  It is all about the curve, it has to always go up otherwise layoffs will happen, regardless of how big the CEO bonus happens to be.
Havoc 7mo ago
Much like oracle MS doesn’t have customers just victims that for whatever reason can’t escape
bob1029 7mo ago
I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows. That makes perfect sense. I don't want to accidentally fuck all my data either. What sends me into an unmitigated schizo frenzy is the part where they double down over and over like it's a game of competitive CTF. Microsoft did the same thing with notepad.exe. At some point it apparently got so intense that they added code to make it possible to prevent association of certain executables with certain extensions (i.e., if you got cheeky and copied the old version over and tried to use it). I know Microsoft deals in a lot of unusual business, but I'd bet my life there is no rationale for deeply restricting the use case here, other than to be an antagonizing prick to the other team/tribe who simply seeks to use their computer freely.
- graemep 7mo ago
  > I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows. The article says its enabled in Windows Server so the driver must be reliable. It sounds more like they want to get people to pay for Windows Server to get high NVMe performance.
  - andrewf 7mo ago
    They may not be confident in its reliability over the fall gamut of cheap consumer drives.

85 points by josephcsible 7mo ago

I mentioned this in the Scott Hanselmen trying to re-allow local-accounts for Windows thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498494 It just seems so beyond-belief that Microsoft keeps having such depraved anti-consumer behavior. Maybe perhaps this was just a not-ready-yet feature folks had enabled being moved around or shuffled. But it seems just as likely Microsoft intends to keep consumers using a decade and a half years old shitty NVMe-downcast-to-SCSI layer indefinitely, to upsell folks to fancier Windows versions or gaming systems. Microsoft intends to keep Windows consumer disk access slow and bad. As a seasoned Linux veteran & believer, it's somewhat against my interest to share this view, to try to arouse the slumbering behemoth to action. Microsoft not getting the message and doing great misservice to their users is somewhat in my interest. The status quo of Linux being far better at everything is great: gaming is already much faster on Linux, & that should be no surprise, and disk io too. Just holding my tongue and letting Microsoft make a fool for themselves with absymal performance would be ideal. But I also believe in competition, and Linux is going to start slacking off if Microsoft can't be arsed to update a disk io subsystem that was a filthy pitiful hack when they slammed it into service a dozen years ago. We all need some pressure sometimes to get off our hinds, wake the frak up, and pay some attention. And perhaps, maybe: even Windows users don't deserve this malpractice.

anakaine 7mo ago
Honestly, who cares if it wasn't ready. It was shipped, available, and required active screwing around by hobbyists to make active. If something goes wrong, thats not on Microsoft - its not an advertised feature. Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes. Its inane that they still rely on scsi downcast, however.
- karlgkk 7mo ago
  > Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes. Or they believe that it has serious issues in a consumer SKU or consumer application.
pjmlp 7mo ago
There is no Linux gaming without Proton, being feed from Windows games, developed on Windows, by Windows developers that will put up with this issues, because they still see no value on targeting Linux natively, and couldn't care less. Linux might finally take off on the desktop if the normies that get Windows laptops and gaming rigs at Media Market and similar chains, finally get to them with Linux pre-installed. Otherwise there will be a few HN folks getting them from System 76 and Tuxedo, Dell online store, and that is about it.
- coffeeling 7mo ago
  The fucked up thing is Windows is the most stable Linux environment to build against. Linux overall relies far too much on the idea that the software is either actively maintained, or open source and can be recompiled for new systems.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    I see an advantage of finally having the Year of Desktop Linux, given the current geopolitics. However until we start seeing those systems being sold on regular stores, with normies distros, it will always be as has been all over these years. The "everyone is going to migrate to Linux" meme keeps coming up since Windows XP Toy's R us UI, however here we are, Steam Hardware survey 2.20% after two decades, since XP.
- raxxorraxor 7mo ago
  Proton serves as a target for now. You cannot have a target that is Linux like you have with Windows, you would have to target different distributions where users are additionally fragmented. Sadly, people getting notebooks in the first place become much rarer. I have seen gen alpha developers that want to start with tablet and smartphone. They don't even know that they are prisoners, just like us and our economic system.

andrewstuart 7mo ago

“NVME?? What’s NVME got to do with anything? It’s the Task Bar! For goodness sake can’t you see Windows users have lost faith because they can’t move the task bar!” (Heard in meetings all over Microsoft campus recently).

saidnooneever 7mo ago
and then they all break out into song and dance. If you reaaaly dont liiike it, dun dudun dun! Lock the taskbar. lock the taskbar! (ref: z0r . de / 2090)
- DiabloD3 7mo ago
  Man, I love 20+ year old memes. The early Internet was a better place.

nicman23 7mo ago

holy fuck, imagine segregating your customers' block layer

ezoe 7mo ago

> The native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys) replaces the legacy storage path that has routed NVMe commands through a SCSI translation layer since before NVMe SSDs existed. What? What are Microsoft doing for a decade after NVMe available to consumer grade motherboard?

kelnos 7mo ago
Seriously, that was my thought too. Even if we were to stretch credibility and suggest that general consumers don't care about this sort of thing, they just released this for Windows Server in the past year? Windows really is a toy of an OS. It continues to blow my mind that people want to use it as a server OS.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Because it offers VMS niceties that UNIX clones still doesn't do, and stuff like AD, SMB, without manually going through configuration files stored somewhere, that differ across UNIX flavours. Although I do conceed UNIX has won the server room and Windows Servers are mostly about AD, SMB, IIS, Sharepoint, Dynamics, SQL Server. Naturally some of those can be outsourced into Azure services that Microsoft will gladly provide.
  - ch_123 7mo ago
    Which VMS niceties does it offer?
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI. Not being an OS from C to C as the main programming model. And then on top, multiple levels of sandboxing, including virtualization of drivers and kernel modules. Ah and RDP is much nicer than X Windows or VNC.
      - jmalicki 7mo ago

kuschku 7mo ago

Supposedly it requires additional workarounds to run in safe mode, and doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller (whether that's in use or not). I also wonder whether this feature will be locked to server and the little-known "pro for workstations" variants.

karlgkk 7mo ago
> doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller well that makes perfect sense, if its a consumer or prosumer grade raid controller, to be honest.

materialpoint 7mo ago

If AI was truly profitable Microsoft wouldn't need to cover their expenses at every other corner.

M95D 7mo ago
That's not how management works. The expenses will be reduced and profit increased by any means, all the time, forever, no matter how much profitable a company already is.
pjmlp 7mo ago
It is all about the curve, it has to always go up otherwise layoffs will happen, regardless of how big the CEO bonus happens to be.

Havoc 7mo ago

Much like oracle MS doesn’t have customers just victims that for whatever reason can’t escape

bob1029 7mo ago

I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows. That makes perfect sense. I don't want to accidentally fuck all my data either. What sends me into an unmitigated schizo frenzy is the part where they double down over and over like it's a game of competitive CTF. Microsoft did the same thing with notepad.exe. At some point it apparently got so intense that they added code to make it possible to prevent association of certain executables with certain extensions (i.e., if you got cheeky and copied the old version over and tried to use it). I know Microsoft deals in a lot of unusual business, but I'd bet my life there is no rationale for deeply restricting the use case here, other than to be an antagonizing prick to the other team/tribe who simply seeks to use their computer freely.

graemep 7mo ago
> I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows. The article says its enabled in Windows Server so the driver must be reliable. It sounds more like they want to get people to pay for Windows Server to get high NVMe performance.
- andrewf 7mo ago
  They may not be confident in its reliability over the fall gamut of cheap consumer drives.