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."

Comments

Re:The real reason why SP1 is not ready

[plague3106]

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?

Re:What would be the difference?

[cnettel]

This is in the area of Really Bad Analogies, but bear with me anyway: Windows 2003 was the followup to XP. Quite a few users who got their hands (ahem...) on Windows 2003 think that it is a very solid workstation OS, handling a few situations better than XP. If blatantly ignoring the lack of drivers, XP64 (which is derived from the 2003 codebase) is also solid. More polish went into handling high-load cases and simple bugfixing, things that were never justified to backport to XP. (SP2 carried over some things and added a few, so until Windows 2003 SP1 was released, there were two clear forks again with non-overlapping features.)

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.

Re:confused

[Joe U]

And, of course, as you noted, XP is losing support next year--just as it's running better than ever! No, it's not. Microsoft supports all operating systems for 2 years past the last service pack.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223

Re:confused

[Joe U]

Ok, I don't like replying to myself, but I didn't do enough research.

When a new service pack is released, Microsoft will provide either 12 or 24 months of support for the previous service pack
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.

Re:FAIL

[domatic]

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.

Re:confused

[Sancho]

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.

How about speed?

[miffo.swe]

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!