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Microsoft Upgrades Vista Kernel in SP1
KrispySausage writes "One of the big features discussed in early speculation of Windows Vista SP1 was the kernel upgrade, which was supposed to bring the operating system into line with the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. With Vista SP1 going RTM, there hasn't been so much as a peep from Microsoft about the mooted kernel update. Has it happened? Well the answer is yes it has. Presumably the main reason for Microsoft's silence on the subject is that as they're keen to promote the improvements and enhancements to Vista, rather than placing emphasis on a kernel upgrade, which some people might see as a risk of newly-introduced instability."
In case you haven't noticed ... Vista is a new OS and _not_ an incremental update of XP.
The overall design of it may be good but of course there is going to be bugs at this point in the game. It seems like everyone keeps forgetting how complicated an OS is.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Maybe you should, you know, keep up. Network and sound drivers are both now userland. Network purposefully yields to the sound driver when its playing sound so you don't get choppy sound. There's a bug where it yields too much. And only if you're copying files on a LAN, IIRC. It was missed because they didn't do testing on a gbit network card.
This has been known almost since Vista's release... where have you been?
What does this mean for Vista SP1? Well, there should be very little reason to use Windows 2008 as a desktop OS. One could imagine that some geek/pro user workloads (network/disk I/O, anyone?) might be improved. On the other hand, these changes should already be in the SP release candidates, and the reviews of those haven't shown any big changes. A practical concern would be that the platforms should be similar from now on, like in the W2K days. I guess that will make at least some hardware vendor developers happy. Maybe this will also mean that additional hotfixes more acutely needed for server scenarios will trickle down to Vista.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/kernel-en.doc Oops, sorry, that isn't quite it, it's for the SP1-less Vista and Server Longhorn. Well, some parts of it may apply, because Vista SP1 *is* largely the "Windows Server Longhorn" kernel, now named Windows Server 2008.
Here's something that should be a bit more accurate:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/4/a/f4a35b2b-2f62-4104-a3e6-5f7bc1318e9f/Notable%20changes%20in%20Windows%20Vista%20SP1.pdf
However, it again doesn't separate the changes in the kernel from the rest, but to a reasonably experienced programmer, one should be able to distinguish some of that from the rest. For example, the new random number generator is likely a kernel change, etc...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I know Linux kernel devs have been switching up the schedulers lately. Well, last year or so. You could conceivably notice that and even get excited about it depending on how it helps multimedia and such. For any other OS, changing the process scheduler and pager would be a pretty big deal.
Of course, it *is* just the kernel. There is so much more to a modern OS that it is hard to stay focused on the kernel unless you're a developer.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223
When support for a product ends, support of the service packs for that product will also end. The product's support lifecycle supersedes the service pack support policy Windows has a 24 month policy
Mainstream support for Windows XP Pro ends 4/14/2009, which means they're not going to sell it or add new features to the core OS.
Extended support for Windows XP Pro ends 4/8/2014, which means no new updates at all past that point.
First of all, I don't want to use Vista. I now run a half crippled XP because HP refuse point blank to supply XP drivers for this model.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the drivers don't exist. They'll be harder to find though. Here's what you do:
1. Go to Control Panel -> System
2. Click on the Hardware tab
3. Click the Device Manager button
4. For each device with a Red X or Yellow !
a. Right Click and get Properties
b. Click the Details tab
c. Select "Matching Device ID" from the dropdown.
5. Shake Google for those Strings. Sometimes you'll hit paydirt just searching for the part before the ampersand.
You can also use tools like AIDA32 and Unknown Device Identifier to identify the hardware. Once you've identified your hardware, you'll probably do OK with the actual manufacturer's reference drivers. While it's possible that a vendor like HP is using slightly bastardized versions of standard chipsets that thus require custom drivers, that usually isn't the case. You may even be able to get the drivers from HP themselves if there are similar models that were supplied with XP.
The product lines (not from the beginning, obviously):
Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows ME -> Windows XP
Windows NT 3.51 -> Windows NT 4.0 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP
Although Windows 2000 was really quite usable for most home users (compared to NT4, especially), it was not considered a home-user OS. That niche was filled by Windows ME. The OSs were even released within the same year (about 6 months apart in 2000, if I remember correctly.) XP came just a year later.
Well, Windows 2000 is currently in extended support which means technically only security related patches are supposed to be released for it, and that stops Jan 2010 I believe. This was a big problem for many companies as MS refused to issue a standard patch for the DST updates for Windows 2000. They had a convoluted manual/policy based process which didn't allow for easy confirmation that systems were updated. XP will enter this same quasi-supported phase in August of next year.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The thing that intrigues me is how they are going to fix the speed/memory issues without ripping DRM out. I have a hard time seeng other than smaller improvements in isolated areas as to Vistas performance less they rip/replace large parts of it. A new thorough benchmark comparing XP SP2 vs Vista SP1 would be very interesting. Does it still demand 2 GB to run smoothly under moderate load? Had one for testing on my desk a while ago (im a sysadmin) and frankly it was a real dog.
Dont get me started at audio issues in most games and audio applications, EAX? forgedaboutit!
HTTP/1.1 400
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
No, the real issue is that instead of processing tcpip at a lower priority than multimedia, it simply refuses to process more than 10,000 packets per second.
What happens is that tcpip processing occours as a 'deferred procedure call' which I think is in kernel mode. Anyway, such DPCs pre-empt multimedia processing which is a user-mode thread (even though multimedia processing is at high priority - DPCs preempt all threads but lose to low-level interrupt service.)
See http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx