The performance issue might be overstated but it is not to be ignored. A 3%
hit on performance is significant, a 20% hit is unacceptable. Moving drivers
to their own protected space would most likely be closer to the 20% than the
3. The answer is that we have to stop writing crappy drivers.
Which brings this around full circle. ‘We’ are writing crappy drivers for at
least two reasons: some of ‘we’ are incompetent and don’t understand how to
do this right, and a lot of our employers don’t give a rat’s ass about
reliability.
We can’t solve the first problem without forcing the issue somehow on the
second. Driver certification partially forces vendors to at least pay lip
service to quality, although my experience is pretty consistent:
certification is currently routinely ignored by hardware vendors.
Driver-writer certification might help as well, if vendors could not get
their drivers signed unless their source code had been audited by certified
driver developers, perhaps the level of competancy would be forced to
increase.
Until vendors care enough to make sure that competent programmers are
producing reliable drivers, nothing is going to change. I agree with the
consumer boycott sentiment in spirit, in reality, I install unsigned drivers
all the time, as they frequently fix bugs in signed drivers. Why is that?
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@acm.org [mailto:xxxxx@acm.org]
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 12:34 PM
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
You are currently subscribed to ntdev as:
xxxxx@stratus.com To unsubscribe send a blank email to
%%email.unsub%%