[regularfry]

> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.