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Vista's Graphics To Be Moved Out of the Kernel
Tiberius_Fel writes "TechWorld is running an article saying that Vista's graphics will not be in the kernel. The goal is obviously to improve reliability, alongside the plan to make most drivers run in user mode." From the article: "The shift of the UI into user mode also helps to make the UI hardware independent - and has already allowed Microsoft to release beta code of the UI to provide developers with early experience. IT also helps make it less vulnerable to kernel mode malware that could take the system down or steal data. In broader terms, this makes Windows far more like Linux and Unix - and even the MacOS - where the graphics subsystem is a separate component, rather than being hard-wired into the OS kernel."
Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?
NT borrowed heavily from DEC VMS, which if it were running on DOS would be like running VMS on top of RSTS.
Just my two cents because I get sick of morons bloviating this crap...
NT borrowed almost NOTHING from the VMS or *nix world. Culter was author of VMS and a brilliant *nix designer, but he also knew the shortcommings of both OS models. NT was designed specifically to be different and not be tied to a *nix or for that matter a VMS architecture.
(In fact Cutler could have made NT a full *nix Windows, as Microsoft owned Xenix at the time, and was willing to go with whatever the Cutler team decided would create the next great OS architecture.)
People can bitch about Windows and specfically Win32, but there is not a whole lof ot NT itself that is flawed or attackable in its design. It is still doing kernel and architectual concepts today that you cannot find any other consumer level OS. PERIOD.
For graphics and sound to work best, commonly used objects are stored in memory, ideally most rapidly accessible by the chipset which makes use of it. If you can pre-load a graphics card with most of your GUI toolkit you can do some amazingly fast rendering.
Ok, this partially true; however, the thing people seem to miss is that when Microsoft dropped Video to Ring0 with NT4 it was to improve video performance for games, specifically WinG and DirectDraw at the time. This was a major performance increase at the time because of the higher level GDI calls of Win32 that were mostly non-accelerated for gaming. ALso at the time 3D accelerated Video Cards were basically non-existent at the time, so machines didn't have a powerful GPU to utilize.
And what this means by them moving the Video back up from Ring0 is of course more stability, so the new NVidia beta build doesn't make the Windows machine lock up when it shouldn't, as most graphic drivers are the root of 99% of all system lockups with Windows, since most users don't run MS certified drivers and are running the latest incarnations.
Additionaly, with the new graphics subsystem concepts in Vista, having Video Drivers in Ring0 is far less important, as the entire WPF is designed to take advantage of the Video GPU from everything from off-screen buffering like OSX, to drawing the entire controls and 3D interfaces.
In fact with the new WPF in Vista, the GPU can even be used to accelerate printing, and creation of XPS graphical/display documents.
So there is no longer a need or reason for the small performance benefits by having the video in Ring0, since the GPU, even older GPUs by today's standards handle all the gaming and now even the new UI controls and 3D vecotoring of the UI.
Basically MS is saying, we are moving to where the GPU will do its job, so we no longer have to compensate software rendering and no longer need Video drivers to have Ring0 access.
Microsoft considered this move with WindowsXP, but with the driver changes needed and the UI still being GDI+ based for most applications, there was still a lot of software rendering taking place. It was only the games that it really didn't matter for as they were already doing DirectX and OpenGL for performance.
My two cents....
(And if you don't believe my post, please go look this stuff up - do your own reseach and not follow the rants of myself or other Slashdot Biases. - Truly, I don't profess to know everything, and my rant is short, you will probably learn more by looking up the stuff I talk about than just reading my or any post and believing it without the poster's personal basis).