But if the hardware is designed for PC systems, all one would care is some
big OEMs(counted by fingers in one hand), right? I’m more interested to know
how many non-windows PC systems these OEM would sell? I’m yet to see a
branded PC that “runs Linux” only.
Calvin
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Jan Bottorff
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 12:10 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] NDIS miniport SurpriseRemoval problem in win2k3
Having dependency between physical PCI functions violate the “Design
for
Windows” rule. Your hardware team shouldn’t have delivered such thing
in the
first place.
I’ve seen a depressing number of hardware designs where the hardware folks
know nothing about Windows requirements. It’s not until drivers are being
written for Windows or even WHQL tests are being run that the hardware
issues become apparent.
This is partially because some hardware folks think Linux and Windows have
the same requirements (and OS is an OS), and since they can look at the
source code of Linux, they can figure out what these hardware requirements
are. Linux is becoming (or has become) the OS model hardware is frequently
designed around. I think this is also partially Microsoft’s fault, for not
having extensive easily available documentation about Windows hardware
requirements. I believe you can’t actually look at the WHQL specs unless you
sign up for a WHQL account, which is WAY down the path of some product
designs.
An example I just wrote about, if you design hardware with PCIe serial
number attributes in the extended config space, you can have a significant
boot image compatibility issue between identical machines. I don’t believe
this is even mentioned in the WHQL docs, and may only be learned when you
start shipping your product to Windows customers. Your Linux customers may
not have any issues.
I think another part of the problem is just a weird belief about what the
installed base of systems is. Here in Silicon Valley, a LOT of people seem
to think Linux has a way bigger market share on servers than Windows. The
assumption must be most corporations run their IT group like Goggle (which
does have like half a million Linux servers). As a result, they design
products based on the that belief, and some get rather rude introduced to
reality when they start shipping their product and find half or more of
their customers exclusively run Windows. The effect though is lots of
products get designed to work well on Linux, and working on Windows is a
kludgy patch, which hurts the Windows ecosystem. I think Microsoft could
help the situation by publishing accurate numbers on things like system
activations, and the mix of systems connecting to system update. I can see
reasons to keep this info secret, but on the other hand, people will make up
the data if they don’t have real data. Curiously, Apple, a pretty secretive
company in general, has no problem making press announcement saying they
have shipped 2 million iPads. I actually have no idea how many copies of
Windows 2008 R2 server Microsoft has sold.
Jan
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