This testing, planning and careful coding were at the heart of VMS. I
didn’t mean that the drivers shouldn’t be written more carefully. I tried
to convey that drivers CAN be well designed, coded, tested and stable and
NOT at the same time incur inordinate performance penalties. The problem
here is that we have WAY too many sloppy driver writers working for
companies that should not be producing hardware trying to meet unre4alistic
schedules.
Greg
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com]On Behalf Of xxxxx@acm.org
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 11:34 AM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Re: Philosophical Rant [was Re: Writing Drivers in
Java]
Greg Dyess wrote:
We SHOULDN’T have to take ANY performance penalty to have a system that
didn’t crash! I’ve had Alpha-based machines that dual-booted NT and VMS.
VMS, despite its reputation as a CPU and memory hog, ran circles around NT
in terms of responsiveness and it NEVER crashed on the exact same
hardware!
Something’s wrong here when we start to even think we should accept moving
device drivers to outer rings to prevent the systems from crashing.
Everyone should start buying only hardware that has successfully passed
the
MS quality tests. I know there are those on this list that will disagree
primarily because the violate MS guidelines for whatever reasons and
cannot
get certification. I myself have stopped buying anything not certified.
If
everyone did that, we could force these fly-by-nighters out of the
business.
Sorry, the we shouldn’t need a performance hit, is exactly why many
drivers do crash, and things are so crappy. I was involved with various
standards efforts for fault tolerance, it was amazing to here large
vendors say “We can’t take a 3% performance hit, just to get 50% more
reliable”. I am not kidding when I say that some of the largest system
vendors screamed this at the top of their lungs.
Good drivers are going to take a performance hit, because they are going
to check and recheck data, and make no assumptions that the world is
either safe or secure. I agree with Peter that the performance question
is overstated, we have the bandwidth to do things well, we just aren’t
doing them.
Finally, while I agree with support vendors who certify their drivers,
that isn’t enough. I have the source of a certified driver in front of me
as I work,
so far I have identified over 100 likely BSOD’s out of the driver, and I
suspect there are at least 1000 probable BSOD’s. Testing will never
replace, careful planning and coding in developing driver.
Don Burn
Egenera, Inc
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