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by dbcurtis 146 days ago
> If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture,

Woah, back up a bit. In the article, it looks like the blue screen is a 0x0 (iopr) exception, likely a wild jump into the weeds. But back in the day, the majority of blue screens were 0xE exceptions -- page fault in the kernel. Why? Buggy driver that didn't wire down a page and it got swapped out from under the driver. Not under Microsofts direct control... BUT... they had a great example in OS/2. In WinNT, there are 2 security rings, kernel and user space. But x86 supports 4 rings. OS/2 used ring 1 for drivers, so that the kernel could both blame the correct driver and also stay alive. So simple. (Of course, it means it is hard to port to hardware with only 2 security rings.) WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare -- and the lowest bidding Asian contractor that is writing your driver for your el-cheapo peripheral rarely signs up for that nightmare.
2 comments
delta_p_delta_x 146 days ago
> WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare

I think one could say the same for any platform; in general, developing drivers is just difficult, full stop. That driver quality for peripherals can be bad is not the fault of the platform. I'm sure I could find dodgy drivers in the Linux tree that were merged in only because 'shrug it makes PineappleCorp's device work, who cares if it is littered with UB'.

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dbcurtis 146 days ago
Well, these days it seems Linux drivers get enough eye-balls on them that anything meaningful is going to get looked at. Sure, I expect there are some low usage drivers in the repo that just haven't had enough mileage. At least with Linux I can see the driver code. (The second day at my current job, somebody pointed me at a bug with an obscure symptom. A quick check of a log file showed a 0xE exception. A couple hours later I posted a link to the bug in source. Somehow, the universe decided to give me a bug I had seen many times before to get my reputation off to a good start -- it's better to be lucky than smart.)
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okanat 145 days ago
At the dayjob we have lots of sporadic problems with USB drivers of Linux in our fleet of embedded devices (RPi). I had a lot of problems with USB-C and Thunderbolt docks in last 5 years. If USB doesn't get enough eyes to not crash/freeze systems entirely, I don't know what else would get. Monolithic kernel design should have belonged to past but we don't get nice things.
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p_ing 146 days ago
There are performance penalties for moving drivers out of the kernel/ring 0. For some things, that matters (network, graphics), for others it doesn't, like printers.

And Microsoft has made the least stable of the drivers a recoverable fault, at least.

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