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ITunes 8 a Real Killer App; Taking Down Vista
CWmike writes "Apple 's latest version of iTunes crashes Windows Vista when an iPod or iPhone is connected to the PC, scores of users have reported on Apple's support forum. Plug in and Vista crashes and shows the 'blue screen of death.' The errors began showing up immediately after updating iTunes to Version 8.0, which Apple released Tuesday as part of its iPod refresh. 'I just installed iTunes 8 over my iTunes 7 on Vista [and] now whenever I plug in my iPod, I get a blue screen death. Three times so far. Even if it is plugged in on boot, I get a blue screen," said a user identified as 'sambeckett' on the support forum about 90 minutes after Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapped up the iPod launch."
AFAIK the only thing that can cause a BSOD is code running in the kernel space, ring 0.
Quite why iTunes affects stuff that runs in kernel space is another matter... but I suspect it's probably to do with the Protected Media Path stuff. DRM, in other words. I can't think of anything in iTunes that should be running in kernel space - in Vista, all drivers apart from a component of the graphics driver are supposed to run in userspace.
And yet, the update demonstrably does not crash XP...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Drivers like the one for the iPod?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This happened to me... I read the Apple thread, and followed simple instructions... unplugged my HP printer, and it stopped the BSOD's when I plugged in my iPhone. Most people are saying the problem is with the Apple USB drivers screwing with the drivers for HP printers and Logitech mice/keyboards. There may be other devices that cause the problem as well, but those two are the biggies.
So until iTunes 8.1 is released, I can either charge my phone or print... but not both at the same time!
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Except the application installs drivers.
And it's not necessarily a bug in the OS if drivers are causing it, unless you run all drivers in the userland like QNX does.
iTunes installs its own CD drivers to manage ripping and burning, as well as always-on "helper" and updater processes, in addition to drivers for the iPod/iPhone.
Asinine, but then again Apple doesn't follow Windows UI guidelines either.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
It is Apple's fault. If you read the forum you'll note that they already tracked down the offending driver in the minidump. It is Apple's USB driver for the iPod: usbaapl64.sys.
That's a nice philosophy, but anybody who's actually written a kernel-level driver will tell you that's impossible. Kernel-mode drivers require direct access to your computer's memory and bus, and anything with that level of access can cuse your kernel to panic, period.
You can make non-kernel-mode drivers that are much safer, of course, but at the expense of performance and capability.
I can tell you that it DOES exist. My Creative Nomad Vision M would simply plug into any up-to-date Windows XP machine, and it would show up as a media device. I didn't need to install the software to see the files on it.
Besides true chodes like Sony and Samsung, both of whom had gay software and stupid drivers last time I owned one, every mp3 player on the planet other than the iPod shows up in My Computer as either a drive or a media device.
The reason, as far as I can tell, is that Apple wants to force you to use iTunes to change anything on your iPod. Kodak does a similar thing with their EasyShare cameras, which is the only real negative of those cameras. Thankfully, unlike an iPod, in a camera you can just pull out the memory card and stick it in your PC.
It's been a long time.
Mod this bullshit down. The iTunes DRM is 100% inside quicktime.qts.
(I'm the original author of PyTunes, the base for Pymusique -- I know a bit about Fairplay)
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
The drivers are USB protocol drivers -- they run in user space. iTunes doesn't (shouldn't) load any kernel-space drivers. It is correct to say that, under the circumstances, it should be impossible for iTunes to crash the OS. iTunes should crash, but Vista shouldn't.
Itunes in past has:
- deleted your legit music
- Unstalled othe mac applications without asking you
- Hijacked volume control from windows
- Modified code specifically to make it hard to work with the ipod outside of itunes
- Is the largest pusher of DRM technology
Really a BSOD isn't that big of a deal. And incase you are curious NO it isn't windows fault. Why is a music player installing drivers overtop of standard drivers that work perfectly? Aside from their hatred of doing things the same even when they are better only jobs knows. If windows tried to pull even half the bullship Apple has they would have been sued into dust. I find it disgusting its ok since its mac.
Vista and XP do have standard handlers for USB devices but Apple does not support this. That is why you can't plugin your iPod and iPhone and except your computer to be able to mess with it, that is why it requires special software adding protocols to your networking stack like bonjour and rDNS services. Of course if you configure so, the devices can be used as standard usb mass storage devices but you'll never get access to your music that way.
This is the principle reason why the iPod sucks, it is everything that Apple stands for which is propietary technology which really requires Apple hardware to work with. I can hook up hundreds of other USB based MP3 players out there without added software but the iPod requires specific software to interface with and don't think about going cross platform, many an ipod has been wiped by going from Mac to PC and visa versa.
You're right, iTunes should not require administrative privileges to install but all that DRM means Apple has to dig deep.
Vista doesn't handle driver issues very well but the majority of this particular issue is definitely in Apple's court especially given all the issues with iTunes 8 on both sides of the isle. At least they are mostly getting OS X right now with a lot of the silly defaults getting changed. Samba support was atrocious for the longest time when the Linux camp had it down.
You can make non-kernel-mode drivers that are much safer, of course, but at the expense of performance and capability.
That depends entirely on what the device is doing - USB drivers live in userspace (only the generic read/write support for USB devices live in kernel space) and it works fine and support everything AFAIK, but running a modern GPU from userspace I wouldn't try. The iPod is definately in the former category.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
HP Printer.
Drivers on windows can be troublesome. It would suprise me if usbaapl64.sys has some issue previously undiscovered.
This is fallout of shared component design MS uses.
Should Apple have tested with HP printers? Probably, but no one can test every configuration of a PC.
The USB set up MS is using is causing a fault in Ring 0. That's the only way I can see this causing a BSoD
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I just installed iTunes 8 and happened to peak at the offending driver's import/exports.
Its written uses the kernel mode driver framework and not the user-mode framework.
BTW, User mode driver framework is available on XP too.
Vista will not magically run kernel-mode USB device drivers in userspace.
There *is* support for user-mode USB drivers via UMDF (User-mode driver framework). But, the driver has to be implemented differently for that to work.
Apple USB driver (Usbaapl.sys) is a traditional kernel-mode driver.
Any unhandled exception (or, perhaps, kernel memory corruption) in the driver will cause a blue screen.
And there is, in fact, a redistributable version of UMDF for Windows XP (SP2 and later).
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
"Doesn't need" is not the same as "doesn't use." IIRC, if you want to port a kernel mode driver to the user mode driver framework in Windows, the path of least resistance is to rewrite it from plain old function oriented C to C++ with COM. So it's possible that it's got direct access because that's the old default and they'd have to rewrite it.
If that's the case, Microsoft deserves a pat on the back for providing a framework for user mode drivers and a kick in the pants for making the framework totally incompatible. In any case older versions of windows don't support user mode drivers and not all Windows XP installations have the user mode framework.
At this point, we don't know where the BSOD coming from yet. Obviously Apple's driver initiates it, but it doesn't mean that's what's crashing. This could be one of those cases where such and so feature is supported correctly in some hardware and not others, so the spec might say doing certain things are kosher and they test fine on the hardware you've got, then you find out that there's a lot of people with systems with broken system hardware or drivers.
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That's entirely possible for some devices in Windows - the Windows Driver Foundation lets some drivers run in userland. In fact, "all" printer drivers run that way on Vista - the WDF runs as a service and acts as a broker of sorts between userspace and kernelspace.
For other devices, it's just not possible. Try writing a user-mode graphics driver and get back to me.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Oh god, have you ever used Minix? The microkernel/message passing approach makes everything horribly slow, and makes the code harder to follow because you can't actually trace calls. And if you crash any of the server processes (especially FS or PM) the whole system crashes anyway - we haven't actually gotten anything from the "trade-off".
The whole OS is an utter abortion in a bunch of other ways as well. Minix 3 has no support for paging - you have to set the VM size of a process as a file attribute! The default installation of vim gives you an out-of-memory error when you run 'vim ~/.vimrc'! Networking is pathetically slow no matter what you do, and the design seems to be generally brain-dead.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
There's a great lightweight player called Play that may float your boat:
http://sbooth.org/Play/
Basically, it has the core functionality of iTunes, it's free as in beer, and isn't bloated.
G-Force music visualization
Hehe shitstorm.
I don't own an iPod, but I have family members that do and I immediately remove iTunes, install WinAMP, and done.
WinAMP can manage an iPod okay, and it doesn't screw with my media library.
On top of all of the crappiness of iTunes, my biggest problem with it is that if you plan on using iTunes, you *have* to manage your media with it. There's no "rescan library" function. If you do it manually, you get two of everything in your list. It sucks and shows much arrogance on Apple's part.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Please see this apple knowledge base page: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2280
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I see plenty of articles about people wanting to run arbitrary software on iPhones (and the iPod Touch handheld) but don't see much about people having problems putting music on or taking music off of iPods using programs other than iTunes, which is what the person I was replying to brought up... along with some sort of "encryption" used on the USB connection.
I provided a nice list of ten programs other than iTunes that read and write music to the iPod. I think that pretty thoroughly debunks said point.
I just went over that list of 10 programs through some (admittedly not thorough) googling, and checked them for compatibility with iPhone/iPod Touch, which are the models that cause the issue due to the encryption/hashing used.
So perhaps your nice list of programs is less useful than you thought, and does not debunk the point.
As far as I know, there is no program other than iTunes that will let you put music on an iPod Touch/iPhone (with v2 firmware) without hacking the device's OS. iirc, hacking the OS voids the warranty, so obviously most people don't want to do this.