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

Re:Is this secure

[atarione]

yeah it is secure

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02 /615199.aspx

 

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.

Where's the Beef?

[Jerf]

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.

Re:Where's the Beef?

[PhrostyMcByte]

I've been using Vista for quite a while now for primarily programming and gaming. "faster" has two areas for me:

1. When using desktop applications- Vista does feel more responsive. This is probably a combination of the I/O optimizations they have done (actual speedup) and the 3d desktop keeping window movements smooth and removing that ugly redraw affect XP has (percieved speedup). Vista also seems to go from cold boot to functional desktop faster. The only OS component which is slower is explorer, because it tries to preview everything (this can be turned off).
2. When gaming, however- Vista is slower. Not by a huge amount, but it is noticable. This is probably because of the 3D drivers using a new API that doesn't seem to give games exclusive access to the card anymore.

I think Microsoft may have unknowingly shot themselves in the foot by making some of the betas public. This made a lot of the "almost-enthusiast, but not really knowledgable" people decide that because the beta had some performance quirks, the RTM must too. And they've been surprisingly loud with it.

Other than some old hardware not having drivers yet, every person I've talked to who has actually ran Vista for a week agreed it is an improvement.

Improve?

[Anonymous Daredevil]

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.

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:Why 'Ready'?

[PitaBred]

No seek time. That's the main benefit over a hard drive. If you need lots of data, it's not that great. But if you just need a few bytes, it'll be faster than asking the hard drive. Ask the USB stick for the first few bits of a page, and the hard drive for the rest, and you get the best of both worlds.

At least, that's how I'd design it if I were much of an engineer ;)

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:Why 'Ready'?

[iluvcapra]

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

Re:Vista seems quite slow to me

[TheRaven64]

Anything would be slow on that laptop (well except for dos or stripped down linux distros). Excuse me? Anything slow on a 1.6GHz machine? What on earth are you smoking? The only things that should come close to taxing a 1GHz or faster x86 chip are:

1. Video editing.
2. Large compile jobs.
3. Some resource-intensive games.

My two backup machines are a 1.5GHz G4 and a 1.2GHz Celeron M, and they are both acceptably fast for 90% of what I do. For the vast majority of users a 1GHz Pentium III is more than adequate. You don't need to run 'dos or a stripped down linux distro,' Windows 2000, XP, or a full *NIX distrubution will be perfectly happy. I have a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIi on my desk, and it has no problems with a full install of Solaris 10, a desktop environment, and a few apps.

You can run DOS or a small *NIX distribution quite happily on a low-end 486 (a 286 lets you run a lot of DOS apps pretty fast). You certainly don't need anything like a 1.6GHz machine.

My pentium M 1.8ghz I bought a year ago runs XP slow Either you have a tiny amount of RAM, or a huge amount of malware. Windows XP was released in 2001. The Pentium M was released in 2004. You are running XP on a CPU two Moore-generations newer than the fastest CPU available at the time of XP's launch.