xxxxx@gmail.com schrieb:
Just out of curiosity, has anyone here had their WDF-based driver package called “large” by a customer?
I was ready to just ignore this, but I’ve now had two different customers now complain
(or maybe just “remark”) that our driver package is on the “large” side.
Our driver package .MSI is only about two megs, and contains the WDF coinstaller (~1.3MB),
the DIFX DLL and our installer exe (~400K), and then five kernel drivers w/ catalog files (~300K).
Obviously the coinstaller contributes most of the size, but I mean, is two megs a lot? No, right?
Well, that depends on how you bring the driver to the machine and to to
what people are used to.
Example 1:
When testing my WDM USB driver, I also had to test it on Windows 98 SE
and Windows ME. As I didn’t have a Win98SE image available, I had to set
up a Win98SE box.
I wanted to install some of the PC drivers using my FlashMemory USB
Stick. OK. Hm - for Win98 you have to use a special MSD driver!
On the manufacturer website I found two drivers. One was in an 800kB
archive. OK, copy it on a floppy disk and install. But it did not work.
The other one came in a 3.4MB install file - and it is highly annoying
if you have to split a monolithic 3.4MB driver installer EXE into four
parts and copy it over to the box (using three or four disks) only to
the get ~50kB of MSD driver files installed in the end.
(And I was lucky I didn’t have to use the 6.5MB install package!)
So if it does not fit on a single disk, for me it is “large”.
Example 2: A Win95/NT driver for an external parallel CD-ROM driver I
had to use three years ago came on three disks. And it was broken, it
would not install properly on NT. So I unpacked the install archives
only to find that the driver consisted of two 5k INF files and two 19k
and 25k SYS files.
More than 2 disks were only for the installer itself. Ugh!
Example 3:
Our complete WDM USB driver installation directory - for all platforms
Win98SE, WinME, Win2000, WinXP, WinXP64, Win2003Server, NET64, Vista32
and Vista 64 - amounts to 150kB (uncompressed).
The WUDF version - only for XP and Vista - amounts to 2.73MB,
of which 2.70MB are for WdfCoInstaller01005, WinUSBCoInstaller and
WUDFUpdate_01005.
Conclusion:
So, yes, 2 MB may be perceived as “large”. And rightly so.
That will probably change in the next years, though…
BTW, guess, whether I will ever roll out the WUDF driver version?
Not as long as I have a choice or until I can do without the 2.70MB
co-installer files.
Comments?
-H