Inside the Windows Vista Kernel, Part 2

BuR4N writes "Mark Russinovich takes a look at the Windows Kernel and the changes made in Vista. In this second part he describes the workings of the features SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot, and ReadyDrive and how they improve system performance."

Comments

Lol Irony

[cheftw]

I am afraid I will be waiting until ReadyVista

Why 'Ready'?

[gEvil (beta)]

Why did they choose the 'Ready' prefix for everything? It seems that using 'Hyper' would have actually been a little more descriptive AND cooler sounding. I mean, HyperBoost, HyperBoot, and HyperDrive? Those sound so much better. And I thought these guys were supposedly big into marketing...

Re:Why 'Ready'?

[zappepcs]

Because, damnit! The guy holding the chair kept yelling at them and wanting to know when it will be ready? They changed the name and he put the chair back on the floor!

Re:Why 'Ready'?

[MidVicious]

Well, they Microsoft was gonna go with 'Hyper', but after frequent crashes, one employee, a Star Wars fan, put on a clip from Empire Strikes Back.

"Prepare to make the jump to lightspeed. If Lando's people fixed the HyperDrive."

"Punch it!"

*cough*sputter*cack*hack*pzzzsst*

"That can't be. They told me they fixed it! It's not my fault!"

Re:Why 'Ready'?

[iluvcapra]

Now if they only had NeverCrash, QuickBoot, HackSafe, SkinnyRAM, and DontNeedAFuckingDirectX9VideoCardToRun ;)

and Ballmers personal favourites

[Anonymous Coward]

ReadyFUD and ReadyChair.

bah same old

[tomstdenis]

Anyone remember smartdrv of yesteryear? How about fastopen? :-)

Tom

Inside the kerne;l

[Cally]

You are lost in a twisty maze of APIs, all alike. It is dark. You are likely to be hit on the head by a chair thrown by a Grue.

Re:Inside the kerne;l

[melikamp]

You are lost in a twisty maze of APIs, all alike. It is dark. You are likely to be hit on the head by a chair thrown by a Grue.

look around

You find yourself in a small, low-level module with dark, twisted passages leading to the West, East and South. The module is illuminated by a single dim pixel; it flickers as if it can go out at any moment. There is a shut window in the wall to the North.

open window

As soon as you start opening the window, it makes a screeching system call that sends shivers down your spine. A security exception is summoned.

security exception bites

You die.

Re:Why 'Ready'? - More Absorbed IP

[TaoPhoenix]

Because they swiped it from Commodore. Light Out, MS.

Poke 53280,0
Poke 53281,0

Ready.

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel ...

[Anomolous Cowturd]

... no one can hear you scream.

Inside the Windows Vista kernel...

[BeProf]

#include

int main() {
        uac_alert("You are attempting to initialize variables. Cancel or allow?");
        int i;

        uac_alert("You are attempting to enter a loop. Cancel or allow?");
        for (i = 0; i 100; i++) {
                uac_alert("You are attempting to iterate a loop. Cancel or allow?");
                i++;
        }

        uac_alert("You are attempting to exit program. Cancel or allow?");
        return 0;
}

Re:Inside the Windows Vista kernel...

[Urban Garlic]

I think it's cool that there's an "i++" in both the loop body and in the for statement, making it be subtly incremented twice per iteration, but I must warn you that posting real Microsoft code on slashdot could get you in trouble.

Re:Inside the Windows Vista kernel...

[Anonymous Coward]

void uac_alert(const char *prompt) {
    uac_alert("You are attempting to show a UAC alert.  Cancel or allow?");

    _show_uac_alert(prompt);
}

Re:Where's the Beef?

[wfberg]

With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?

Of course not. That's why they're called SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot, and ReadyDrive.

My motherboard for example, comes with: BuzzFree, LifePro, PowerPro, SpeedStar, and ActiveArmor. I'm pretty sure all that means is that it, by now, obsolete.

If these features were of any use besides being marketing snakeoil and/or painfully obvious, they'd be called "the hvuk__k() tweak" or "deloop_64" or "-O3" or something.

Re:I think I will be ReadyNever

[nmb3000]

Not to mention that nobody had to invoke Godwin during a flamewar between the kernel and shell teams! Hell, do the two teams at Microsoft even have flamewars? If not, how can they possibly communicate?

*Yawn* Let me know when they get some REAL developers over in Redmond.

Re:WTF

[Peter La Casse]

Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process.

Okay, so I just wanted to nitpick a sentence here. What happens between 512 and 700.

If you have between 512 and 700 MB of memory, Vista tears a rift in the space-time continuum. IMPORTANT: whatever you do, DO NOT install Vista on a computer with between 512 and 700 MB of RAM.