[LINK] The Great IT Outage of 2024

[Frank O'Connor]

They update, yes … but I’ve yet to hit a Windows driver update that didn’t need a reboot. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I do use a third party driver and software updater utility, in preference to updating through Windows, but I think the same update then reboot is necessary in Windows.

That said, for me the real problem with MS and drivers is that they load them into the OS kernel rather than the application memory space that other operating systems  (Linux, MacOS and other UNIX variants) use.

The upside of this is that the driver functions more efficiently with the OS … increasing speed of I/O,  operation and reducing latency.

The downside of course is that if the driver is porked it takes down the whole system …which is not the most terrific error trapping performance in the known universe, as it results in a BSOD.

Note for Microsoft … "Driver error …. oops … kernel failure …. BSOD. Sorry about that, and no you don’t get an error report to help you nail the problem.” is not a viable error trapping mechanism for the modern world.

I can understand why this occurred in DOS and early Windows variants … which effectively had minimal to no memory management … but to leave it in place after say Windows 7 (the last version of Windows that I actually liked) is more than a bit annoying.

Of course, these days I only use Windows sporadically, and never for ‘mission critical’ applications.

Just my 2 cents worth …
...

> On 21 Jul 2024, at 4:28 PM, Chris Maltby <chris at sw.oz.au> wrote:
> 
> Microsoft allows Windows drivers to update without a reboot or necessarily a system rollback image.
> 
> The real question is why (beyond supposed "efficiency") does Windows not sandbox driver code so that third-party bugs don't blue-screen the system?
> 
> Speedy updates against zero-day issues are a necessity for anti-virus/anti-intrusion systems, so they need that extra bit of failsafe support from the OS.
> 
> Chris
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: 	David <dlochrin at aussiebb.com.au>
> To: 	Stephen Loosley <stephenloosley at outlook.com>, link <link at anu.edu.au>
> Date: 	Sun, July 21 2024 01:55:31am GMT+00:00
> Subject: 	[LINK] The Great IT Outage of 2024
> 
>> Haven't Microsoft considered the possibility of such an event?
>> 
>> The UEFI boot system which has replaced BIOS in most Linux systems backs
>>  up pre- and post-update images before & after any update, so a
>> known good image can be booted immediately there's a problem.
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at anu.edu.au
> https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link