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Dell Documents Reveal Microsoft's Pre-launch Vista Errors
twitter writes "The New York Times has a piercing analysis of documents from the Vista capable lawsuit. The documents show that Microsoft seems to have put a wrench in Vista's driver situation only at the last minute. 'Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues,' said one slide in a Dell presentation dated March 25, 2007, about two months after Vista's launch at retail and availability on new PCs.' We have all heard the lazy vendors don't believe Vista will launch excuses but few of us have heard Steven Sinofsky, chief of Windows development, second and third opinions. 'Massive changes in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM,' he said. 'This change led to incompatibilities. For example, you don't get Aero with an XP driver, but your card might not (ever) have a Vista driver.' Finally, said Sinofsky, other changes in Vista blocked Windows XP drivers altogether. 'This is across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on. Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.'
I am wondering what went wrong to force Microsoft to change kernel and break drivers at the last minute. Because of a design flaw that compromised security? Or DRM?
Many of the associated applets don't run within the constraints of the security model or the new video/audio driver models.
When rebuilding a system from the ground up for security, these issues need to be hashed out first. The fact that the security and driver models were changing significantly shortly before launch is a sign of bad design. Or at the very least horrible project management. If Vista was in the works for over 5 years, and it was designed properly from the start, 3rd parties should have had plenty of time (years) to conform to new models.
Developers: We can use your help.
The driver models for audio and video in Vista are drastically different than they were in XP. Microsoft is trying to push towards a more microkernel-ish model where these drivers are intended to exist in user-mode. The entire Vista audio stack is user-mode and the video stack is divided into two portions where a good 90% exists in user mode and the rest remains in kernel mode for performance reasons. Microsoft is also trying to force hardware scheduling to prevent a single accelerated application from hosing an accelerated desktop, which is currently a problem in all accelerated desktops, Compiz and OSX included.
The driver situation wasn't any better when XP was launched. If anything it was much worse because all of a sudden consumer-grade hardware vendors had to jump to supporting the NT kernel rather than the 9x kernel, which finally locked down the memory isolation so that a user-mode app could not access kernel resources. It took years for the big companies like Creative Labs, nVidia or ATI to get half-decent drivers out for XP. The situation for Vista is already much better than it was for XP.
All the more reason to avoid release dates. Whether it's completely arbitrary, or it's an estimate given by a developer, release dates only result in two things: Making people rush, and making products late or not as advertised.
I can understand a statement such as "We hope for our product to be ready by [date]" or "We're aiming for a possible launch window of [date]", but to say "Our product will be available on this date" only puts pressure on those lower down the totem pole, and can result in a lot of lost features or quality assurance.
Conversely, this should not be used to infer the Duke Nukem Forever will be an awesome game if it is ever released.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
If ndiswrapper can run XP drivers in Linux, then surely MS could have run XP drivers with no problems at all.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Perhaps, one day, when competition re-emerges in the OS marketplace, microsoft will have to clean up their act. Until that day, and as long as people keep giving microsoft their money, nothing will change.
/. are the people who laugh at those who do ...
It is too bad that so many people who would benefit from reading
The quotes in the summary explain why Windows XP drivers would not work; they do not state that driver model changes were made right before RTM.
Dell and the like could just keep shipping systems that they know can't run aero with windows XP and don't use the Vista capable stickers on them?
This is the part that bugs me about this. It might be true that MS considers vista without aero to be fine when they shouldn't. However no one is forcing dell to use the stickers, Dell and the like used them on computers they knew couldn't run vista fully. They do it because they knew people would buy the computer thinking it would run vista.
When it turned out vista was crippled on the machine insted of Dell going "Ooops sorry, heres some store credit" (or whatever) they went "Don't look at us, MS made us do it! blame them!" As if MS was the one who built the computer.
I just looked through the article. DRM and "digital rights" searches both turned up nothing. What the hell are you talking about?
FYI: Postmortem also has an informal definition meaning "an analysis or review of a finished event".
This user had a particularly clever way handling the driver compatibility issues of his "Vista ready" system.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno
actually it's not. The previous version was from internal Microsoft memo's. This one is from Dell.
This means even the vendors putting Vista ?Ready sticker son computers knew those computes wouldn't run Vista all that well.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Nice strawman there.
What has been said, is that stability and security should not be compromised to provide backwards compatibility. Drivers are not usually at the high end of security risks (that's for charming things like ActiveX).
With the fast hardware and cheap RAM we have now a days, there's no reason to start moving to a VM model, allowing for compatibility *and* security. But Microsoft and its unholy OEM alliance with manufacturers are not interested in that, but rather in forcing upgrades of both OS and hardware. Microsoft and the manufacturers don't give a shit about the customer, but only about the bottom line, and Vista is an example of that self-serving attitude finally catching up with them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've been running Vista since the early beta days and it's my main desktop system and also powers my mediacenter. The only XP drivers that definitely wont work are video drivers, drivers for things like NIC, disk controllers etc all work fine. On my main system, Only HP and Microtek (prinet and scanner respectively) have yet to provide fulle Vista drivers for my system, and the XP drivers work just fine.
Has it occured to you that probably the ultimate motive of moving drivers from kernel space to user space is STILL DRM?
Namely, to prevents developers from creating unauthorized audio/video drivers that can create analog outputs to all media.
Late OS code changes broke drivers...
This reminds me of the painful driver development from NT4 to Windows 2000. A few years before release MS was pushing us to port NT4 drivers to Win2K. We jumped on it quickly and had working drivers, but as the years rolled by changes would be made that broke the earlier work. This rinse and repeat continued to the *very* end. Years of wasted time and resources for no reason.
What I learned from that is to start looking at new Windows driver documentation a few months before release and then wait until the actual release before changing or writing any code. You just don't know what fundamental changes will occur until the discs are on retail shelves.
You sure as hell can't trust what MS tells you as a developer about interface changes and release dates.
No it's not. It's just more Microsoft marketing-speak. For example:
The new video and audio drivers have nothing to do with DRM.
Reasons include moving as much software out of kernel mode as possible thereby minimizing bug checks (in layman's terms "BSODs"), developing an architecture to make debugging audio problems in applications easier, and supporting a whole new generation of Digital Rights Management (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx) Vista is not 10%-50% slower. Of course, none of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than 2x slower than the most current builds of its older sibling. Either Microsoft supports it, or Microsoft can kiss all high-def media good-bye.No, if Microsoft doesn't support it, we can ALL kiss DRM'd high-def media good-bye, and good riddance. Microsoft had been a key supporter and booster of computer DRM despite their customers' distaste for it. Don't try to pretend they are anything but complicit partners with the studios in this.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Microsoft hashed the release of Vista, but the Linux community of all people has no right to talk about new releases making drivers incompatible. Backwards compatibility doesn't exist in the linux world.
Examples please. All my devices work the same or better under SuSE or Ubuntu.
All my purchased Linux (Loki) games still work.
I can't say that for my $300 Microsoft Office 6.0 purchase under Windows. I can't say that either for the Windows games I've purchased over the years.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy
This one is quite simple - it's digital signature checking. Before UAC shows that dialog box, it does a digital signature check of the installer .exe file. Well, that file is 400 megabytes. This digital signature lets it warn you if you're trying to invoke an unsigned program with high privilege.
The reason it takes so long is that it maps the entire file linearly into memory to hash it. Such a large mapping gets demand-loaded, which for a linear scan is very slow.
The workaround is actually quite simple. Run Command Prompt as Administrator, then run the installer from there. The signature check will be on cmd.exe instead of a 400 meg file.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Microsoft actually remade a critical system call, NtCreateProcess(), explicitly because of DRM. Translated to the UNIX world, this would be like redesigning fork() from scratch just to protect VLC from being debugged.
.exe file and ntdll.dll. No initial stack, no main thread. The parent process actually uses the debugging API to inject them into the new process. Even the the environment and current directory are injected this way.
Prior to Vista, NT had a "create process" mechanism differing in design from most other operating systems. NtCreateProcess() creates an empty process with nothing in it other than the new
This worked well until Vista. In Vista, their DRM system had a problem: they didn't want anyone to be able to debug audiodg.exe, but the parent process had to be able to debug it in order to start it. The solution? Redesign the entire process creation system such that the kernel does all the initial process creation procedures so that the parent does not have control over the child if it is a "protected process". Hence, NtCreateUserProcess() was born.
For those that don't believe that this change was for DRM, I offer proof in the form of a Microsoft kernel developer on video explaining it.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager