Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Windows Graphic Technology
Ben writes 'Extremetech has an article discussing the future of Windows graphics technology. The article uses information from presentations at the recent WinHEC, and outlines the Windows Graphics Foundation and other technologies expected to make an appearance in Longhorn. Particularly interesting is the Longhorn Display Driver Model: 'With it, Microsoft is aiming for that ideal situation of 'graphics just works.' For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.'
For example, if you upgrade a graphics driver today, you typically have to reboot the system. One example of the 'graphics just works' mantra is one of LDDM's goals of allowing installation of graphics drivers without needing to restart the system.
Didn't I hear the same "no rebooting" line with Win2k and with WinXP? Not that I wouldn't enjoy that, it's just that I've lost faith in these types of claims.
-Valiss
How often does the average user update the video drivers in Windows? Do they really care that it requires a reboot? I would guess that less than 0.1% of my Windows reboots are prompted by updating the video drivers.
how often do you load a new grafics driver?
I am amazed at how many software packages still require a reboot. IMHO this is much more annoying.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Didn't BeOS do this? Don't a great deal of modern operating systems do this? I fail to see the innovation.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I'm a bit afraid if their approach to "it just works" begins at the graphics driver.
My Linux servers usually have uptimes in the order of a few months at most as kernel upgrades do require reboots (still). Did Novell servers not have such issues with kernel-level patches?
see a Text Widget
I don't mind a single reboot to install a graphics driver. As it is, there is no means to hot-plug an AGP video card that I'm aware of, so down time is required just to install that upgrade. I don't see rebooting for a very occasional upgrade. However, I don't think a reboot should be necessary for most software.
One of the things I like about OS X is that I don't have to reboot to use most software. Some OS level upgrades do require a reboot though.
How many times have we seen breathless articles all slack-jawed over some new technology that Microsoft is getting ready to unveil
Vaporware anyone?
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Funny, however, how the rendering scheme and virtualization of graphics card memmory sounds awfully like the new, and currently shipping, graphics engine in Apple's OS X. (Quartz and Quartz Extreme.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Win 2K and XP do seem to manage this on some (rare) occasions. The architecture seems to be there to support it, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn does what they say.
More importantly, though... it looks like Longhorn's graphics capabilities really are set to stand out from the Linux (and even OS X) crowd. It's a pity that Linux graphic teams haven't managed to unify and focus on getting an integrated "product" out. We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform with established animation APIs etc. Hopefully we'll catch up before we start to look too old.
The first is that this can probably be exploited by malware/spyware to make "invisible" interfaces that sit over top of existing applications, happily monitoring everything you're doing.
Transparent windows don't "see" the windows underneath them. Either you can capture the screen (which you can do in current Windows without having to display anything (cf. VNC)) or you can't.
But by far the worst is going to be the end-user customization. Want transparent yellow spinning windows that change opacity based on the phase of the moon? Bet you can do that!
So what? Let the users annoy themselves.
I can certainly understand refusing to reboot a server that needs to be on 24/7. Fine. But why do people get their panties in a bunch over rebooting their own personal machines? I run Fedora Core 3, yes it takes minutes for it to boot up, but when I do I usually don't sit there staring at it. When I turn my computer on in the morning I do something else while booting up, like brush my teeth. This development manager friend of mine looked at me strangely when I kept rebooting my laptop to fix networking issues. Why do you reboot your machine so much? Because I don't know how to selectively start and restart processes. Because I don't know which ones to start and restart. With names like ntpd, how would one know? If I restart processes, don't others depend on them? Won't they get hosed? Etc. Etc. Or I can waste a whole five minutes of my life not worrying about those things and just reboot the damn thing. And chat with my friends in the meanwhile.
"This brings a question to mind -- does anyone know exactly why Windows still requires reboots for these kinds of things? This makes my life positively MISERABLE."
For a similiar reason to why you have to reboot after changing your Linux kernel.
There are some silly people out there that run Windows servers... it'd be nice to update to a more stable graphics driver without a full reboot. But that's just conjecture, as I have no Windows servers, and like it that way.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
... is that maybe, just maybe, since they are able to replace a critical file and feature at run-time without rebooting means that Longhorn will finally be able to replace a file even while it's in use, like Linux does.
That would actually be really neat. Wasn't Longhorn going to break some more compatibility will older apps in order to have tighter security. Maybe that's a restriction that will be gone.
As much as I hate Microsoft and Windows, to be fair... you can't upgrade your video driver in XFree/Xorg without restarting X at least. Granted it's not a full reboot so non-GUI daemons still run... but X needs to be restarted.
Or am I missing something?
So yes, being able to do a change to something in the driver without rebooting would be infinitely useful.
But I'm part of a small crowd.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I don't tend to worry about video drivers on servers. I suppose if there's some issue of stability then I'd be forced, but other than that I usually just use remote admin and remote control tools, so it could be a low-end or older PCI card for all I care.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And you don't see how that is confusing as hell to the 'average joe' user? Hell, it's confusing to me, and I've been programming since I was seven years old... and that means I've been doing it for over 2 decades...
Until Linux gets over their archaic install issues it'll never take off in a big way in consumer land.
(And yes, I like Linux, I try to have as much here at my workplace running on Linux when it makes sense... it's just not user friendly.)
That sounds like something nVidia should fix themselves unless it's caused by a limitation in the OS.
Are you implying that you have to reboot Linux in order to install the video driver? You certainly don't but then again to all the "but you don't have to rebootpeople -- you do have to restart X, which is something of a pain if you don't have a good session manager. To the desktop user, a crashed X is just as destructive as a crashed kernel, and likewise a restart of X is just as interruptive as having to reboot.
I'd imagine that some code to 'ssupend/resume' the state of X might be a pretty neat project to undertake, but I'm not sure anyone has done it yet..
First, linux requires you to deal with source code. Fine for you techheads out there. Bad for consumers unless it is *invisible* (i.e. just part of the install process that they dont see), and right now it just aint - at least not on all distros.
Second, (and this one's just going to eat at Open source people) - many companies dont want to release their source code. It was hard to write, and often they had to invest millions to create it. Why should they release it for free?
I'm not going to start a flame war by arguing that this is right or wrong. It just is. I need to be able to create a single binary and installer that I can release to the linux world and expect it to work across (at least) most distros and recent versions. Thats commercial reality.
MS have got it right only because they have a slow moving platform and no fragmentation. You wrote a driver in 2000 for windows 2000. In 2001 you needed to update it for XP. The linux world is very fast moving - here we are preparing to take on the 12th release of the 2.6 tree - and that has created issues for driver manufacturers.
Sorry, but would that be really that useful? I mean, how many times per day are you planning to update your drivers?
How many times per day do you update your libc, and does it requires rebooting? Why not? What about servers?
Besides, "server migration" is not useful just for this. It's needed for wireless connections - if you're using a remote X app and you move, suddenly your app breaks, it disconnected from your X server. The Right Thing to do would be to restore the communication when the connection goes back - this does not happen today. Although perhaps it's not called "server migration" but "supporting app disconnection"...dunno, I'm not expert.
Your two things are: malware exploits, and aesthetically jarring end-user customization.
The first one I think is a bit panicky, as I fail to see why any manner of "3D" would be any more or less secure than a 2D interface. What does the extra math have to do with security?
The second one is a common complaint aired in many different ways. It is true that many end users will create ridiculous desktops using 3D - in fact they create ridiculous desktops today, using 2D. My sister has her old Aptiva loaded with every damn croaking, tweeping, fluttering rainforest-styled thing there is, complete with bad-animated-GIF desktop icons and a mouse cursor that squirms.
We all know those brutal, punishingly bad Flash animations that festoon the Intarweb. And we all moan about how bad Flash is, that it shouldn't exist, etc.
All of these arguments trace back to: people sort of suck most of the time at design and aesthetics. They're not trained for it, and they don't have an innate sense of what pleases most people. All the Longhorn Aero Glass and Macrodobe Flashter Effects in the world do is empower that flaming mediocrity into full-blown animations and desktop effects that they simply could not do before. A small (tiny, in fact) subset of people will create glorious things that we haven't dreamt of.
The Japanese way of designing things has always amused me, because it is so rigid and defined; and yet this is why we love them. They know the power of an unblemished white wall. North Americans want every little variable and control in the interface exposed so we can fuck with it to our heart's content (isn't that what we do with computers? That and minesweeper?) but the Japanese don't like to do this. Take the PSP. You cannot change the 'desktop' picture, and not only that the (very pleasing, very Mac-like) translucent wave pattern in the background has a specific colour tint. Mine was pink when I bought it. Lots of people's first comment when you turn it on was surprise: "Pink?" The background colour changes every month. There are 12 colours that have been chosen by the design samurai at Sony. You cannot change them, they are immutable. This Is How It Is Designed. We think its a bit fucked because we're used to being able to set Edwardian Dayglo Yellow Outline Dropshadowed emails but they just won't allow it. Anyways I digress a bit.
Forget worrying about whether Aero will make Windows uglier, it gets the job done by itself as it is. There will always be ways to make ugly stuff in spectacular ways with our spectacular computers, so there's no point in blaming the software for enabling spectacular Lameness.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
1. Even Nvidia's installer "Just Works" and doesn't require me to type the traditional ./configure; make; make install. It does it for you, in the background, during the installation process. To me this mimicks what people see in Windows. For all the user nows in either case, the installer could be having a tea party in the background, it doesn't matter since it just installs and works.
2. Nvidia's Linux driver's are not fully open source. Sure there is a very small minority of FOSS people who are miffed at Nvidia for not going 100%, but I think most of us here are perfectly fine with them keeping some of it closed since it is true proprietary info that could lead to ATI figuring out some of Nvidia's hardware secrets. This just shows that closed + open software can live together without the world ending or a company going out of business. Just keep open what needs to be open (basic interfaces/API calls) and you can leave closed what needs to be closed (true proprietary information).
Space for rent, inquire within
"Problem is, from an average desktop user's perspective, rebooting X is the same as rebooting the system."
Oh, great, another stupid reason to denounce Linux!
Jesus, some people simply shouldn't be allowed to have computers...
So you have to "reboot" to install a new driver! Big fucking deal! With Windows you have to reboot to FART, for Christ's sake - not to mention total system lockups you can't fix with a simple "reboot" of X.
Should OS's be able to update themselves without restarting ANYTHING? OF COURSE, MORONS! When some of the idiots who write OS's get their head out of their ass and have some fucking clue what an OS should be able to do (hint: there should be no such thing as "applications" - an "application" should just be something the OS knows how to do), maybe we'll see some improvement.
In the meantime, as I've complained about a hundred fucking times, Microsoft pisses away 37 BILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS on a one-time stock prop scheme instead of at least TRYING to make things easier for people...
Compared to This, bringing up the necessity to restart X as a comparison to Windows is just plain fucking STUPID!
(Note: I'm not necessarily screaming at the poster to whom I've responded - I'm screaming about the idiots at Microsoft and the further idiot geeks who design OS's without a clue.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Which is increasingly becoming annoying to me as these installers are requiring admin privileges but can't relaunch the Finder? I get installers telling me I need to reboot for no reason. They're not installing anything that gets loaded only at boot time.
Mac OS X includes a kextload command. If your kernel extension is going to cause problems you need to label it beta. If not, then the installer needs to run a kextload script.
Why is an installer telling me I need to reboot when i just need to log out and log back in? That's another gripe.
More than not, it's the developers that aren't following spec or procedure that make things difficult, not the OS. Since most Windows applications refuse to use MSI (when almost all Mac OS X programs use Installer) I'm sure there will still be dozens of cases where the installer tells you to reboot just as VICE installers on Mac OS X occasionally force-quit all applications for no apparent reason (like we're still in Mac OS 9 land).
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Sorry, but why should hardware-vendors think so? i think they should be glad if someone takes their driver-source and improves it because it might increase their sales... after all they are hardware-, not software-vendors
The main trick that the new Windows graphic technology will pull in order to utilise the 3d part of a video card is to use a texture for each toplevel window. Then the desktop will be like a video game: each 60 frames per second, the textures will be rendered by the 3d hardware with various effects.
/. crowd has already pointed, restaring the X-Server is almost like rebooting: all desktop apps need to be interrupted.
This trick is essentially wrong: it requires vast amounts of graphics memory for no particular reason. Just as the article says, computers will require 512 MB, even 1 GB of graphics memory. This is plain silly! in order to have a few nice 3d fx (with questionable usability), there is gonna be tremendous memory requirements.
The same effects could be easily delivered to the user by not representing each window with a texture, but by vector graphics. The modern desktop consists of a few thousand lines/fills that can be easily handled by the 3d hardware. By using vector graphics only, there are huge benefits: a) the desktop is fully scalable, b) memory requirements are minimized, c) the screen can be rotated in a split second, d) the full range of effects is possible.
As for the feature of not rebooting while upgrading the graphics driver, it's a useless feature. It has only marketing value for Microsoft: since Unix is not rebooted to upgrade the graphics driver, Windows has to follow. But as the clever