Still beats BSOD which kills the driver, the game and everything else...
Guess the next level of 'self healing' could be the driver killing the game if it does something wrong. Of course a well written driver should not crash if not used properly, but either ignore the call and/or return an error, possibly crashing the game if it doesn't handle the error properly, which also resolves the problem;) The end goal being that the nefarious software (be it the driver, the game,...) gets killed (and possibly restarted in a correct state) without bringing down anything else.
But again, buggy app or game bringing down a driver is already an improvement to it bringing down the entire system.
Much as I hate to admit it, I was quite impressed when I installed Win7 beta, and shortly thereafter the screens flashed black and then went back to the normal desktop and a balloon popped up saying: Windows detected an instability in the NVidia video drivers and has restarted them.
At first I was pissed at NVidia, but hey, it's a beta system with beta drivers. Then I was really impressed with MS for handling this so gracefully rather than a bsod. So I think we're getting there with driver isolation and restarts, even in commercial OSes.
No they haven't.... The french have only heard of 'peritel' Fortunately it's the same connector, it's just the french being the french had to come up with their own name for it;-)
Well, I suppose maybe I'm gettin' old, or at least old-fashioned, and probably (mis)formed by years of working how the 'system' told me I was supposed to work, but...
I want folders! I do exactly the opposite of what you describe. I file my files and e-mails in (for me) logical hierarchies of directories (that what we called them folders when you were still wearing diapers, boy). I hate 'my documents', because it doesn't show me where it fits in the hierarchy (which disk, which sub-dir etc..). I have work, private and archive pst files in Outlook, each with folders per topic or project and I (usually) know where to look for a particular e-mail. And I've never understood the desire to put everything in one 'Explorer' which changes columns depending on what you're looking at, or 'unified search engines' (No Google Desktop or WDS for me!). If I'm looking for an e-mail I'll go to the relevant Outlook folder, and occasionally search for it (Outlook has the relevant fields for finding e-mails). If I'm looking for a file, I'll go to the relevant directory, or if need be, use find or Windows search, which have the relevant fields for finding files. Makes sense to me...
Now get of my lawn with your newfangled search-don't-file ideas!
Can't find the link right now (probably was in Dutch anyway), but I remember reading that police in the Netherlands (a densely populated country with terrible gridlocks in rush hour) was going to act against SLOW drivers on highways, precisely because of this.
..at work that is.
I work at one of the major oil companies, and when MS said that Vista (uhm.. Longhorn at the time) was due in, what was it, 2004, 5?, they actually believe it and decided to skip XP.
fast forward to 2008.... I just hearded that the roll-out of Vista which was scheduled to commence this month has been postponed, possibly for a year, because the pilot users encountered serious problems (don't know the details). I work in geophysics (fortunately on Linux for now) and am supposed to move to Win, but we need 64-bit to work with out multi-GB datasets. Last year IT actually scrambled to test a limited roll-out of XP-64 for so-called Power-users, and it appears they're now making that available to a much larger group, since Vista-64 is nowhere near ready for roll-out, or so they say. But because XP was never planned for, and it will only be an 'interim solution' (we'll see about that...), they won't test and deploy all our software on it, so we'll get an XP-64 box for technical work, next to our standard Win2k box for office work. Talk about duplication of hardware, support, etc.... believe me, if Vista were anywhere near half-usable in a business environment, they'd be upgrading now rather than mucking about with such 'interim solutions', which nobody is really waiting for.
Didn't the context of the original post seem a little odd for DSL to mean Digital Subscriber Line?
Well no, I thought GP was implying he wanted to use web-hosted apps and on-line storage to compensate for lack of local storage. Which seemed weird in the context of the project....
Of course, that's source. At binary level, everything changes. You can't load a kernel module compiled for another kernel version: There're checks to avoid that: Even for the cases where it could work.
I think this is exactly what the GP was complaining about. If the APIs don't actually change with every (minor) kernel release as people keep pointing out, then why would vendors (users) have to recompile their modules for every version ?
Esp for binary-only driver this is a major headache (complain about binary only all you want, but companies are going to do this, live with it!).
NVidia wrote this script that checks their ftp site for pre-compiled modules for kernel versions of all the major distros and if it doesn't find yours it recompiles the wrapper around the binary driver on-the-fly (meaning you need kernel source/headers installed and properly configured and even then it doesn't always work). On debian I even have to hand edit a header to add the arch of my platform (-k7) to the version string, because that's what they've done for the pre-compiled kernel, but it is not in the (arch independant) source...
Now I figured this out and fixed it, but many other users wouldn't. And why does every patch have to be coded in the kernel version:
e.g. 2.4.21-32.0.1.nfswan2 (RHEL 3) instead of just 2.4.21 ??
Fortunately some workarounds can be found: as pointed out elsewhere, if you use a common distro you can find apt/yum repositories with pre-compiled modules for the pre-compiled kernel versions (I use this now for NVidia). It does mean that you're usually a couple of versions behind, but I guess most people can live with that (I can). Still, it would be a lot easier (for users and vendors) if the modules were numbered by API/major kernel version, rather than kernel/patch/arch/phase of the moon version...
Slashdot Mirror
Still beats BSOD which kills the driver, the game and everything else... Guess the next level of 'self healing' could be the driver killing the game if it does something wrong. Of course a well written driver should not crash if not used properly, but either ignore the call and/or return an error, possibly crashing the game if it doesn't handle the error properly, which also resolves the problem ;) The end goal being that the nefarious software (be it the driver, the game, ...) gets killed (and possibly restarted in a correct state) without bringing down anything else.
But again, buggy app or game bringing down a driver is already an improvement to it bringing down the entire system.
Much as I hate to admit it, I was quite impressed when I installed Win7 beta, and shortly thereafter the screens flashed black and then went back to the normal desktop and a balloon popped up saying: Windows detected an instability in the NVidia video drivers and has restarted them. At first I was pissed at NVidia, but hey, it's a beta system with beta drivers. Then I was really impressed with MS for handling this so gracefully rather than a bsod. So I think we're getting there with driver isolation and restarts, even in commercial OSes.
No they haven't.... The french have only heard of 'peritel' ;-)
Fortunately it's the same connector, it's just the french being the french had to come up with their own name for it
I want folders! I do exactly the opposite of what you describe. I file my files and e-mails in (for me) logical hierarchies of directories (that what we called them folders when you were still wearing diapers, boy). I hate 'my documents', because it doesn't show me where it fits in the hierarchy (which disk, which sub-dir etc..). I have work, private and archive pst files in Outlook, each with folders per topic or project and I (usually) know where to look for a particular e-mail. And I've never understood the desire to put everything in one 'Explorer' which changes columns depending on what you're looking at, or 'unified search engines' (No Google Desktop or WDS for me!). If I'm looking for an e-mail I'll go to the relevant Outlook folder, and occasionally search for it (Outlook has the relevant fields for finding e-mails). If I'm looking for a file, I'll go to the relevant directory, or if need be, use find or Windows search, which have the relevant fields for finding files. Makes sense to me...
Now get of my lawn with your newfangled search-don't-file ideas!
Ofcourse most of Linux using America _are_ virgins (you know you are if you're on Slashdot ;-) )
:-)
Disclaimer: I'm a father of two. But then again, I'm not american
Can't find the link right now (probably was in Dutch anyway), but I remember reading that police in the Netherlands (a densely populated country with terrible gridlocks in rush hour) was going to act against SLOW drivers on highways, precisely because of this.
..at work that is. I work at one of the major oil companies, and when MS said that Vista (uhm.. Longhorn at the time) was due in, what was it, 2004, 5?, they actually believe it and decided to skip XP. fast forward to 2008.... I just hearded that the roll-out of Vista which was scheduled to commence this month has been postponed, possibly for a year, because the pilot users encountered serious problems (don't know the details). I work in geophysics (fortunately on Linux for now) and am supposed to move to Win, but we need 64-bit to work with out multi-GB datasets. Last year IT actually scrambled to test a limited roll-out of XP-64 for so-called Power-users, and it appears they're now making that available to a much larger group, since Vista-64 is nowhere near ready for roll-out, or so they say. But because XP was never planned for, and it will only be an 'interim solution' (we'll see about that...), they won't test and deploy all our software on it, so we'll get an XP-64 box for technical work, next to our standard Win2k box for office work. Talk about duplication of hardware, support, etc.... believe me, if Vista were anywhere near half-usable in a business environment, they'd be upgrading now rather than mucking about with such 'interim solutions', which nobody is really waiting for.
Well no, I thought GP was implying he wanted to use web-hosted apps and on-line storage to compensate for lack of local storage. Which seemed weird in the context of the project....
NVidia wrote this script that checks their ftp site for pre-compiled modules for kernel versions of all the major distros and if it doesn't find yours it recompiles the wrapper around the binary driver on-the-fly (meaning you need kernel source/headers installed and properly configured and even then it doesn't always work). On debian I even have to hand edit a header to add the arch of my platform (-k7) to the version string, because that's what they've done for the pre-compiled kernel, but it is not in the (arch independant) source... Now I figured this out and fixed it, but many other users wouldn't. And why does every patch have to be coded in the kernel version:
e.g. 2.4.21-32.0.1.nfswan2 (RHEL 3) instead of just 2.4.21 ??
Fortunately some workarounds can be found: as pointed out elsewhere, if you use a common distro you can find apt/yum repositories with pre-compiled modules for the pre-compiled kernel versions (I use this now for NVidia). It does mean that you're usually a couple of versions behind, but I guess most people can live with that (I can). Still, it would be a lot easier (for users and vendors) if the modules were numbered by API/major kernel version, rather than kernel/patch/arch/phase of the moon version...