[vlovich123]

That can be treated as an OS bug that’s fixed by updating the kernel to the latest version that fixes compat with that driver, which you can do because the driver remains unchanged. With Linux, even with DKMS, you’d need to backport your fixes to that old kernel in addition to maintaining the latest kernel version. And on mobile DKMS is not a thing.

[xorcist]

I believe you might be limited by your imagination just how bad out of tree third party drivers can be. We're talking about hardware with DMA access here. It's trivial to create a situation that can not be fixed in the kernel (without breaking other things).

If you are running some generic PC hardware to write this comment, chances are that at least one tiny part somewhere which is dependent on some specific obscure timing to come up properly which just happens to work because someone inserted a small delay somewhere.

[vlovich123]

I don't disagree with that and yet somehow Windows manages to largely maintain HW compat across major OS upgrades with the same crappy third party driver ecosystem.

[yencabulator]

Microsoft is exactly the kind of vendor that will be inserting those small delays in weird places to keep a popular-but-broken device working better. Their focus on backwards compatibility has historically been very strong, and at the same time that has often lead them to not even attempt to clean up their platform. NT came to be largely because the legacy mess got too hard to deal with.

[xorcist]

Windows drivers are absolutely version specific. Try to install a driver for an old Windows version sometime.

[vlovich123]

They generally tend to work for a very long time, like for 5 years at least. That’s literally the reason Windows has a stable ABI. Linux generally breaks drivers every 6 months or so.

[xorcist]

It doesn't? Try loading a driver written for an old version of Windows. Third party drivers generally won't work for the next version of Windows. I have a printer that had a Windows 7 driver. It won't load on any more recent version than that.

The same printer works with Linux the same it has always done. But that's not Windows' fault or to Linux's credit. It's just the result of a really crappy vendor. However the Linux API is generally more stable than people give it credit for, it's just that it's the C headers only. Anything compiled for a kernel generally won't work anywhere else, and that's not what the crappy vendors wants.

In the embedded space, including most mobile phone vendors which seemed to be an important use case for Fuchsia, even reputable vendors will generally give you an image of an operating system heavily modified to work with their hardware. That's their "driver". Imagine buying a new PC and receiving a DVD with a Windows modified to work on that hardware only. Of course you can't upgrade or even patch security issues beyond what the vendor will give you! You're supposed to buy new hardware. Sure, you could extract the drivers and try to install them on a vanilla Windows, and that's exactly what projects like LineageOS do, but most users won't bother.

That's the situation with phones. It's not at all clear why Fuchsia thinks they could solve this. It's a cultural and an economical problem and can't be fixed with software alone. Why would phone manufacturer care about your microkernel architecture? They will just patch the whole operating system, binaries and everything, until it boots enough to start the GUI and ship that. Just like they always have.

The only thing that could improve this situation is by enforcing the GPL, or have similar contractual stipulations like only being allowed to ship a reference implementation unmodified, but Google shows no interest in doing that. They care about getting Android on as many devices as possible with no regard to their respective quality or product longevity.

[pjmlp]

So far Windows has kept driver APIs stable across multiple version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model

Naturally, as you point out, it can do nothing against forced obsolence if the the OEM expliciltly tied the driver to check the Windows version.