Doubts. UNIXen are portable.
Max
----- Original Message -----
From: “Jonathan Borden”
To: “NT Developers Interest List”
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 8:13 PM
Subject: [ntdev] Re: Philosophical Rant [was Re: Writing Drivers in Java]
> I though unix had done something similar to this for some of their
> ‘drivers’. Is this true?
>
> - jb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Peter Viscarola
> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 11:03 AM
> To: NT Developers Interest List
> Subject: [ntdev] Re: Philosophical Rant [was Re: Writing Drivers in
> Java]
>
>
>
> “Art Baker” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> >
> >
> > A driver is a piece of the operating system – a privileged extension
> > of
> the
> > I/O Manager. The correct approach is to make it “perfect” during the
> design,
> > coding, and testing phases of its life (i.e., before it goes out into
> > the world). It’s NOT appropriate to be sending out buggy drivers with
> > the hope that, somehow, the operating system’s protection scheme will
> > keep your driver from doing too much harm.
> >
> This happens to be a topic in which I’m very interested.
>
> In my experience darn few people send their drivers out hoping that the
> O/S protection scheme keeps them “from doing too much harm.”
>
> On the other hand, there are tons of semi-competent and grossly
> incompetent people writing drivers for Windows these days. In fact,
> it’s so freakin’ complicated to write anything more than a trivial
> driver that even otherwise good engineers can pretty easily fall into
> the semi-competent category.
>
> Many of you have read MY personal philosophical rant (ie. my
> Pontification) in The NT Insider a few months back on moving all the
> drivers that aren’t required to boot the system out to user mode. I
> honestly think that everyone would be better off if all "non essential
> drivers " (admittedly a term requiring definition) were moved someplace
> where their faults could not easily affect the stability of the overall
> operating system.
>
> The other day, right in the middle of playing a Snoop Doggy Dogg CD, the
> some audio driver blue screened my system. I was also in mail at the
> time. I was not happy. Fortunately, Outlook is pretty
> failure-resilient. I only lost my last few minutes worth of work. But
> it was still annoying.
>
> I realize it would take some serious work, but I really think it’s
> possible to create a windows driver environment that would make it close
> to impossible for a driver to crash the system. If the driver failed,
> just unload it and restart it. How cool would THAT be?!?
>
> In terms of the performance issue: Performance is largely a specious
> argument. There’s more CPU time available on modern processors than
> (almost) anybody knows what to do with. Would you, as a user, pay a 10%
> CPU utilization penalty for a system that never crashed?? Damn! I know
> I would.
>
> Peter
> OSR
>
>
>
>
>
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