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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.'
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.
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
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?
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'm going to make the presumption that you're ignorant, as Windows 2003, and to a lesser degree 2000, is pretty well known for being rock solid operating systems (the whole "only up for x days!" argument is circa 1999 and is very, very stale).
What you may be talking about, and I've seen this mistake a few times, are uninformed admins that monitor their servers and note that SQL Server, or Exchange, as a couple of quick examples, keep consuming more and more memory until finally your machine is saturated.
Super diligent admins schedule regular reboots, all while muttering and complaining about those leaky MS apps.
Of course the reality is that the apps are proactively enlisting memory for cache, and if you haven't restricted them they'll use all available memory eventually (they'll release memory if other apps make memory demands).
Amazing how frequently that is misidentified as a "memory leak".