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.'

Comments

reboots?

[prell]

Is the ability to update without rebooting a side-effect feature, or a full-effect feature? It seems like something only a consumer PC (i.e. not a server) would have to do, and infrequently. Is it really a demand that people have?

Re:Microsoft, the Leader in Technology

[sweetfathairyjesus]

Even if I change the USB port my webcam is plugged into, I get the obligatory "Windows has found new drivers, would you like ot reboot". My prediction is, it's never gonna change. And that makes me a sad Panda!

No reboots

[bigtallmofo]

It's nice that I won't have to reboot to upgrade my video driver. Now if they could fix the memory leaks that seem to be so rampant in Windows Server and its applications I might have an average uptime that is longer than 1 month.

I remember in my old Novell file server days that it was common to have Novell 3.12 servers with an uptime of 2 years or more. From what I understand, this is common among just about every operating system other than Windows Server (which is the primary operating system I deal with).

the Equivalent of Muzak

[Alien54]

I used to say that Muzak was music which had nothing wrong with it. and that is what the problem was, since while there was nothing wrong with it, there was nothing right with it either.

which is what made Muzak so horrifying.

Microsoft seems to be walking in the same direction.

Re:the Equivalent of Muzak

[Jerf]

Have you taken music theory?

If not, you may be surprised to find you are surprisingly close to the truth. The basic story of music theory up until the 20th century was the increasing acceptance of the idea that dissonance was necessary; going from now-archaic single-melody lines, through melody lines with a second line always a perfect fifth above, and so on in very incremental (and, within the context of music theory, often extremely characterizable) steps. The era of Bach brings us the first music that would sound right to the modern ear, both due to the acceptance of even temprement and harmony, but the permissible harmonies of the time are still relatively simple (it is the permutations that the complexity comes from, not the underlying harmonies); one of the amazing thing of that era of music is what they produced under the brutal consonance constraints (and limited instruments available, though that limitation was more technological) that they composed under.

Without "wrongness", a "low", a "conflict", there is no "rightness", no strong "high", no "resolution". ("Resolution" being the key element of theory pretty much, again, until the 20th century. By then the acceptance of dissonance basically became complete and music went in several other directions. The academic tradition and "popular" music finally split paths, something I've heard rumblings that academicians just now noticed is, ultimately, a problem for them ($$$)...)

Repurcussions of Graphics-Intensive Desktops

[DevolvingSpud]

There are 2 big things coming over the horizon, once Longhorn lets us have advanced 3D graphics on our desktops.

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. Or, kind of like those one-pixel GIFs that show up on the odd phishing page. No fun.

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! It'll be like the old programs that let you add sounds to all the Windows events. When the average user got a hold of that, it was only a matter of seconds before their machine became the Box Of Annoyance. Thank Jeebus people finally grew out of that (mostly). But watch and see - it's coming again, only this time it's got GRAPHICS.

Now, it may open up a whole new world of "desktop modification pranks." Hmm.

why DO we have to still reboot???

[yagu]

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.

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.

A typical experience for me... I have all of my machines set up dual boot, all with some distro of linux, and either XP Home Edition, or XP Pro. I do most of (but not all) my work on the linux side, but when I do boot over to XP inevitably it's more than just one reboot, it's almost always at least 2, and many times it's 3! (not 3 factorial, just 3 exclamation). Typically this is a result of something in my XP environment updating itself, be it Windows itself, virus protection updates, or just the vendors download of updates. Invariably a download occurs (after granting permission), and then the update, and then the dreaded popup dialog box with some such message, "For the updates to take effect you must restart your computer. Restart now?"

And some of those dialog boxes offer no clickable option other than "OK" which means reboot and you have to jump through an extra cognitive hoop and remember to click the "X" in the corner of the dialog window (to defer the reboot).

On the other side... I don't remember the last time I've had to reboot my linux for any kind of updates, and I do get updates in linux on a pretty regular basis (as many as in Windows). What gives? I don't think the architecture for XP is so arcane it can't support recognizing and using updates without a reboot. Does anyone have solid commentary on this? (Not that my life's going to get any better around this anytime soon -- but it'd be nice to know if there's some bonified (sp?) reason for this step-into-the-twentieth-century XP behavior.)

Will Mac OS 10.5 be out before Longhorn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple brought out 10.4 about 17 months after 10.3. I wonder if 10.5 will appear on a similar interval and be out in late 2006. I can see Steve Jobs raining on Bill's parade with another OS release.

Slightly off topic wrt their drivers

[pg110404]

In some ways, I think microsoft goes out of their way to find the most cumbersome and assanine way of developing their drivers.

We have a computer at work running XP that constantly hoses its USB drivers and every time I plug in my flash drive, it says it found and installed new hardware *AND* I have to reboot! I have to reboot because it had to figure out a flash drive again since the last time I rebooted it?

Why is it also that when you plug in a USB device on one port, it loads the driver and if you unplug it and plug it onto a separate USB controller it needs to install another instance of the driver? They don't automatically go away either. If the one goes away and a new one in a different spot shows up, the first one should 'just get recycled' and claimed again, regardless of what USB port it's plugged into. I can see a second one show up if you plug a second one in while the first is still plugged in, but who has two identical printers simulataneously connected? I have a parallel printer so I don't know the full intricacies of USB printers, but doesn't it show up as a second printer to applications?

I think microsoft has a very long way to go to make their drivers actually useful. At least they finally figured out how to change network settings without always having to reboot.

Detonator or Catalyst upgrades

[tepples]

As it is, there is no means to hot-plug an AGP video card that I'm aware of

Aren't some video cards available in PCI, and don't some mainboards support PCI hot-plugging? And aren't there "thin client" monitors that work over Ethernet using X11, VNC, or some proprietary protocol?

so down time is required just to install that upgrade.

Not if it's from say, version 32.23 of a driver for a given card to say, version 43.45 of a driver for the same card.

I don't see rebooting for a very occasional upgrade.

With the NVIDIA or ATI graphics driver updates, you typically have to uninstall your current driver, then restart in 640x480 pixels in 16 colors, then install the driver, then restart again. Some drivers need three or more restarts.

Re:NTFS is journaled

[Blakey Rat]

What is the difference between NTFS and a "full-fledged journaling file system?"

Is Apple's HFS+ "full-fledged?" What does that even mean?

Re:Longhorn graphics and Linux

[NanoGator]

"More importantly, though... it looks like Longhorn's graphics capabilities really are set to stand out from the Linux (and even OS X) crowd."

*Cue stale arguments about non-needed eyecandy etc, even though Longhorn sends its graphic stuff out to the video card.

Anyway, yeah, I think it's a good bet Longhorn's going to stand out. Anybody seen the recent keynote address Bill Gates made about Longhorn? They gave a couple of demos that were pretty interesting. Most of the graphics were vector based and scaled up quite well when magnifying. The screenshots everybody bitched about didn't tell the story of having an OSX'esque changing background and animated windows.

What really struck me about the Longhorn demo was the idea that resolution doesn't really matter anymore. Running at 1600 by 1200, but Calculator's too small? No prob, scale it up. This may not be a BFD to anybody, but it means that monitors can go even higher in resolution without making everybody squinty. We may, in the next 10 years, have 300dpi monitors. That'd be pretty slick.

Re:Is it so important?

[NanoGator]

"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."

So... it isn't welcome then? I just rebuilt my gf's computer. I had to reboot a couple of times, one of them was simply to get the video driver going. Okay, it was another 30 seconds out of my day, but it still would have been pleasant if the screen just flickered a bit and suddenly everything was working.

It may not be the biggest time sink in the world, but I do like leaving my computer on for weeks at a time. (Yes, even in Windows, even though the uninformed still keep making 99'esque BSOD jokes.) Upgrading a video driver can be a little expensive if I've already got a bunch of things open in a state I'd like to get back to.

Re:Lets compare windows to linux

[NotoriousQ]

There is already such a thing, but it is not quite up to par. NoMachine NX server and a client running on the same machine would work. Basically the server acts like an X server, and holds all connections, while the client gets the server redirected messages.

Similarly an older utility called xmove basically did the same thing.

The main issue is they sucked. Now you ran two xservers, and hence twice the marshalling, hence twice the latency.

Your method of client transfer is pretty good, but it has a lot of challenges, and would require work on the core X protocol. I hope the X11 server gurus are in fact working on it, as it would be very sweet. One instant issue is who will handle the connection if the X server goes down. X11 libs? Needless to say, it would not be easy to fix that in the protocol.

One last thing you can do, and that I suppose how windows will handle it: Keep running the server as if nothing is happening, but stop drawing to the screen, and reset the screen in the meantime. One thing that I would have no clue how it can be handled is direct rendering, as those apps write directly into the video card.

Cool idea nonetheless.

Re:OS X - Quartz

[ergo98]

Talk is cheap.

I completely agree with that, actually. It means little that Microsoft has been yabbering about predecessors of WinFS for a decade when it isn't serving any use for me today. Nor does it help me today that Longhorn will feature new Super Frickin' Duper graphics. Talk is cheap, and Microsoft is notorious for talking far beyond their capability of delivering.

My contention, though, is this perpetual "Apple Invented Everything" mantra that every Apple fan seems to buy into unquestioned. Apple has shown a brilliant ability to deliver, but delivering isn't the same as innovation.

Re:Is it so important?

[shird]

I think its mostly important when rolling out updates to thousands of machines or automated installations etc, where the whole process is a lot smoother the less reboots that are required.

Re:Lets compare windows to linux

[timeOday]

...in order to update a driver, be it 2D or 3D or whatever, you need at least to reboot X. ... What we need is to modify xlib to support "server migration"

There is VNC which breaks the fixed association between an X session and an X display. I find this handy for long-running X programs (such as a bittorrent client) I might want to start from home, and pull up from another location (ok... work) later on.

Unfortunately, VNC is useless when you need high performance.

I was a bit jealous upon noticing that XPs remote desktop can migrate a "normal" logged-in session to a remote session. (Then again I was a bit disgusted when I noticed XP pro can only host 1 user session at once - logging in remotely kicks off the terminal user!)

Why should you ever upgrade the graphics driver?

[Animats]

If it weren't for Microsoft endless Direct-X N upgrades, everything would just run OpenGL 2, which is well-defined, stable, and supports everything the current generation of hardware can do, including pixel and vertex shaders.

Microsoft created the upgrade problem to churn the customer base. It's purely a Microsoft-created problem.

Re:Lets compare windows to linux

[spoco2]

Urgh... I have, and I do... I have installed a number of distros, have played around trying to get a usable desktop system going for work users and was really happy to begin with (I think this was Fedora), but then started running into walls with certain simple hardware/software things that required some pretty deep understanding of what was going on under the hood, and I just thought "This ain't going to work for our users".

I want it to work... I want to have a bunch of the desktops at my workplace running Linux, and I'll do it again, I'm sure.. and next time I might try and note down everything to do with the experience and post it somewhere... just so I can remember what the silly things were that discouraged me.

At last, back to NT 3.51 we go

[ka9dgx]

Windows NT 3.51 was, if I understand it correctly, the last secure kernel version of Windows. The folks in Redmond had learned from their adult mentors at IBM the wisdom of leaving graphics outside of the privileged ring. This was during the era when Microsoft was pushing the possibilty of a C2 securty rating for the OS.

Windows NT 4.0 dumped the security and stability of this arrangement for the dubious goal of faster graphics. Things haven't been the same since.

Perhaps this is a step back to stability? I sure would like to go back to the years of uptime I had when my main servers were NT 3.51, and the only down time was for hardware upgrades.

--Mike--