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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.'
Wow upgrading a driver without having to reboot? Amazing! This along with alpha transparency in IE7 and a full-fledged journaling file system should launch Microsoft into a new age of technology, the 90's.
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?
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.
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).
I'm a big tall mofo.
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
I'm a bit afraid if their approach to "it just works" begins at the graphics driver.
From: Bill
Subject: Re: Longhorn
Hey Steve,
Has the research team figured out why the *nix machines don't have to reboot all the time?
Bill
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
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.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
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.)
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.
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.
"The NVIDIA kernel module has a kernel interface layer which must be compiled specifically for the configuration and version of the kernel you are running. "
For the win.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The new engine in DNF won't use displays, as it will pipe the image directly into your brain. It'll be done WHEN IT'S DONE, dammit.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
Truly revolutionary. See what you're missing Linux and BSD users? AND I'll just bet Microsoft will add their own antivirus app to Longhorn so you can conveniently just send all of your moeny to one place. Top that, OSS hippies!
This guy is way out there
Is Norton (or others) really doing something at the kernel level
Yes. They scan before the CreateFile function even returns.
Internet Explorer (which I never intentionally use)... why would that require a reboot?
Windows doesn't let you replace in use files, it doesn't have to be something kernel level. Since explorer is really internet explorer, you either need to shut down the interface or reboot.
Desktop Window Manager
Quartz Compositor
Note this has been around since before Mac OS X 10.0 (March 2001), gaining hardware acceleration for compositing in Mac OS X 10.2 (August 2002) and most recently hardware acceleration of 2D primitives in Mac OS X 10.4 (currently available to developers only).
A very large number of parallels exist between Apple's Quartz, Quartz 2D, and Apple's OpenGL model/abstractions and stuff coming in Longhorn.
Of course I can't fault them for running with a good idea and one that is a generally logical extension of OpenGL concepts mixed with ideas from the 2D world (PDF, painters model... good old SGI guys).
We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform
Actually there has been a bunch of movement towards a better graphics architecture. Cairo is mostly driving things at the moment, because it provides a unified API for 2D graphics on X, Max OS X, Win32, and PDF/Printer output. Because of this Mozilla.org are planning on completely replacing all their graphics, not just SVG, in GFX 2.0 with Cairo (except possibly embedded stuff). I suspect that as they get going there will significant cross flow from the Mozilla side into improving Cairo and copying ideas and code from mozilla.org into Cairo.
GTK is also moving to a Cairo base, because it is also a big win for them, and there are some noises about QT...
One of the big features of Cairo is that it makes use of the Xgl/glitz pipeline, which accelerates 2D rendering in must the same way as Avalon. The final architecture still has to be worked out, but there's a good chance that Cairo will run directly on the hardware, with OpenGL/DRI support, and that much of the higher level X stuff in new Xorg releases with use Cairo for their rendering
Cairo is very much designed to be like Avalon on the API level, and to fill a similar role to Avalon and Core Image on the Mac. The only things not being addressed by Cairo are 3D (mostly OpenGL's area) and video.
Regards,
-Jeremy
No, no, no! They are nothing like each other. If you look at the diagrams, you'll see that the Longhorn graphics pipelines run from top to bottom, whereas the Mac OS X graphics pipelines run left to right.
They're orthogonal to each other...
And, if one of our customers at work is to be believed, XP may still need a reboot, after switching it from DHCP to a static IP. Granted most customers claim they have "windows millenium edition 2000" or "2000 XP" or even "windows 95 XP"...
But this one that I remember clearly, didn't even bother to tell me. I had to ask what color her start button was, and she answered "green".
Good luck with that.
you had me at #!
The most probably culprit I can think of are file locks.
In Windows, it is impossible to replace a file in use, so when an update touches a dll that is used by whatever else process, Windows has to reboot to get rid of the lock, replace the file on reboot, and continue.
Unix, however, lets you replace any file. The old version stays still on disk as long as an application has it open, so all running applications will continue to work just fine. They will use the new file as soon as they are restarted. This way, I can replace every library in the system without having to reboot.
The Windows approach has advantages too. I could do a security upgrade on my ssl-library, and if I dont restart sshd, sshd will still use the old, insecure library, and this, till it is restarted.
Personally, I prefere the Unix way. After all, other tools can restart applications after library updates, so this shouldn't be enforced by the OS.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
I don't know what they claimed, but here's what they did, off the top of my head:
--Network changes don't need rebooting. You can change IPs, or even go from DHCP to static, etc with no rebooting.
--Non-essential drivers, like NIC drivers doesn't require a reboot, at least if the company isn't stupid. Try it with an Intel NIC someday, they install and you go, no reboot.
--USB/Firewire devices just work and need no rebooting, unless the manufacturer makes some speical driver that requires it.
--Many software installs that used to need reboots no longer require them. Things like video decoders, services, and so on are installed on the fly and made available. Many older peices of software that claim needing a reboot don't in reality.
There may be more, I haven't used 9x in years so I can't remember all the things that made it reboot. However they made significant headway with 2k/XP. Reboots are generally limited to system updates, and core driver updates. If they can get it to the point where thigns like graphics and sound drivers don't need reboots, all the better.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
Wow upgrading a driver without having to reboot? Amazing! This along with alpha transparency in IE7 and a full-fledged journaling file system should launch Microsoft into a new age of technology, the 90's.
You linux Zealots all sing the same refrain with your vague posts:
a new age of technology, the 90's.
Try substantiating your comments with FACTS! Your post _should_ have read:
a new age of technology, the mid 90's.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.