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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."
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...
This guy's the limit!
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/0
Q: Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?
A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
This, combined with H-HDD mentioned later on in the article, seems to cancel themselves out.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
yeah I saw some ASUS board that had 256MB flash memory onboard for this application (readyboost) reviewed..but I can't remember which model......but I imagine more MB may add this feature as Vista takes off.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
With all these performance-improving things, shouldn't performance actually, you know, be improved?
Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.
So, as I have not used Vista and have no plans to (I'm with Linux), a question: Can anybody tell me that they put Vista on their computer and things are now noticably faster? I've heard from people with the opposite experience, now I'm soliciting evidence that all these Ready* things actually help people.
Some friends were visiting last night and they had recently purchased a new HP laptop (1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM with 80 GB HDD). I was struck by how abysmally slow Vista was. The thing had Vista Home Premium on it. Putting a blank CD entailed a wait of anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds before the stupid dialog came up asking if I wanted to burn something to the blank disc. Connecting to a wireless network was a complete disaster. My wireless network is setup to not broadcast its SSID, so I had to enter the setting manually along with the WPA password. As soon as I was done, the thing would take the dialog away and then not connect. It took me 30 minutes of hunting to find the listing that had the wireless networks I had manually entered in (as opposed to the networks which were broadcasting). To top if off, the system kept prompting to allow things that it really seemed I should not need to be asked. I am seriously not trying to troll here, this is just
my first impression of vista.
This benchmark article shows that SuperFetch and ReadyBoost can help improve app launch times a bit, but mostly only if you have woefully tiny amounts of RAM in your computer.
However, this slew of benchmarks shows Vista to be slower across the board then XP.
Anyone remember smartdrv of yesteryear? How about fastopen? :-)
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Because they swiped it from Commodore. Light Out, MS.
Poke 53280,0
Poke 53281,0
Ready.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I always notice the greatest improvement in speed is when I reinstall XP, then about 9months later it slows down again. (no it's not spyware, filesystem frag etc..). This slowdown phenom. is well documented in windows cirlces.
Does Vista suffer from this same problem?
... no one can hear you scream.
Software patents delenda est.
#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;
}
You are attempting to read sigs. Cancel or Allow?
Instead of just assuming that the AES-128 is the golden key that locks cached data, please consider that their implementation may be lacking.
For example, where are they storing the encryption key? It's certainly on the PC somewhere accessible to all for now.
Security programming is hard, really hard. I don't doubt that Microsoft has very gifted security programmers, but I very much doubt that they were given free reign. Most likely they were forced to implement managerial compromises that, well, compromise the system security.
Also consider the CPU cycles required to do the encrypting/decrypting and that this is just one of MANY tasks the OS is doing with encryption-bound services. Those are just two factors that hardly constitutes speedy/secure anything.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Dont blame microsoft. You were the one who bought a vista notebook with only 512 ram.
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. I presume it does the same thing at XP would have. But this sentence is confusing, and perhaps implies that perhaps Ms. PacMan will get launched in this scenario.
Overall though, an interesting series. Kudos to the author.
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.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Flash can survive only so many write operations. Normally it's not a practical limitation, but what happens when the OS is constantly doing rw's for caching?
The last thing I need is to have data corrupted as it moves through a bad flash stick, and is then potentially written back out to the hard drive later.
If they pick the best names the first time around, they won't have any room to innovate new fancy names for these technologies in the next Windows.
Really the title of this article should be "Microsoft Implements Fresh New Names for Existing and Obvious Technology in Vista Kernel."
Doesn't seem like Linux can do that. I'm not making any judgement on the relative benefits of Windows and Linux here, but the kneejerk fanboy "linux can do that too!" response needed to be addressed.
Basically, using flash memory for swap. Linux has been able to do this for a long time.
This is not what ReadyBoost is doing.
That depends on who your neighbor is: a pimple faced, socially awkard, teenager that spends his spare time turning toasters into Linux boxen or a grandmother who can't seem to access voice mail on her new "modular" telephone? Considering that encryption is AES 128, it may be compromised by one of the two types of neighbors.
If you replaced "pimply Linux geek" with "respected crypto analyst with large amounts of computing resources at his disposal", you'd still be just as wrong.
Did you confuse AES128 with 56bit DES or something?
If you do have an example of someone breaking AES128, don't post it - publish it.