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Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jun 14, 2006 08:20 PM
from the four-stars dept.
from the four-stars dept.
QT writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft is finally trying to do something about PC driver problems. A new crash-report-driven Driver Quality Rating system will be used in Windows Vista to rate drivers. Drivers that rate poorly in real world use by users will lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers themselves. Maybe now submitting crash reports will feel more useful? This is long overdue."
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Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System
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Bogus Crash Reports (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 06 2005, @10:30PM)
Re:I don't know about you (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't know about you (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 09 2005, @03:04AM)
void pass_the_buck(void)
{
unsigned int *a;
for(a = NULL; *a = 0xdeadbeef; a++)
}
If they lose status then (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the end of CD DRM drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be one of the greatest things ever, or another huge disappointment.
Re:Is this the end of CD DRM drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what will probably happen is this: StarFor... oops, I mean "Generic copy-protection driver #3" crashes for some unknown reason. Copy-protection vendor's response? Oh, it was probably due to bad hardware or due to another copy-protection companies buggy driver interfering with our perfectly coded one. But you won't be able to verify their claim since the driver resists debugging and is encrypted!
So it's par for the course in this situation.
Re:Is this the end of CD DRM drivers? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://vftp.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 09 2006, @09:52PM)
Thought not.
This is different for say, a network card. THAT you would care about.
So, the RIAA types can do as they very well please with their driver malware seeing as it has zero impact on them if they lose a rating they never really had in the first place.
Crappy SATA Driver (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.severeboredom.com/)
For the record I'm using a ECS KT-600A mobo with a VIA VT8237 sata raid controller.
I'm running Vista Beta 2 now on the same box with a driver from Microsoft and it is more stable then Win2k was with VIA's SATA driver.
Now that is sad.
Does Microsoft need to be doing more to ensure the quality of the drivers running on their operating system? You bet.
Good for them, will it work? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.foobarsoft.com/)
Good for them to try to do something like this, but will it work? After all, aren't all major PC manufacturers generally shipping parts by good companies (ATI, nVidia, Creative, Intel, etc.)? I'm not sure this will do much there, but for the end user market it may be quite a bit better. The only question is how you would rate all those companies that sell nVidia cards and just repackage the drivers. Do they get nVidia's rating since it's their driver, or do they get a lower one since they take longer to package updates?
Driver manufacturers can't exactly be trusted though. Read this story [msdn.com] I found today on a MS weblog.
I know the modem in my computer is necessary for boot-up.
One problem there. (Score:2, Interesting)
Also how long before some hardware company resorts to spyware tactics so people can't click the "submit crash report" button?
I know what I will do (Score:4, Interesting)
This include any driver which add a tray icon app. Do we realy need that each wireless card vendor bundle its own wireless configuration software?
Yes, I know you don't have to use it, but most people think they do. Try to explain to the average joe why there is TWO icons displaying the status of his wireless connection. Or that changing the color settings of the monitor depends on the video card driver.
When I bought my cheap 3.5'' USB SD/CF card reader, I didn't know that it needed a special software to work. At last in Vista I will be able to mod them -1 bad driver.
Re:I know what I will do (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 29 2006, @06:44PM)
I've been configuring computers to use the crap OEM wireless config utilities, only because MS's util is even worse. In particular, MS's tool doesn't show a list of all the WAPs in range; instead, it will just pick one for you.
I wish I didn't have to do this, especially on newer Dell Latitudes. With those (can't remember if these particular ones have Dell or Intel wireless) a big popup comes up every couple fscking minutes alerting you that there's a WAP nearby, wouldn't you like to connect? Now, you can turn off the onboard wireless with a physical switch, but that's different from how everyone else does it, so lusers must be Edjumicated. At least I don't deal with PhDs, heh.
It's a little worrying... (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that it's a good idea to have developers rate drivers, because serious developers should know whether or not the drivers are bad, or if their own code is what is causing problems.
I think that it's stupid to open this up to end users.
When it comes to this sort of thing, they think that they know a lot, but in reality, they really don't.
Sabotage ? (Score:2)
Exploit! (Score:1)
I never submit crash reports to MS (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, you have no control over the data going to MS. I presume they tell you that it is only driver-specific and doesn't reveal anything about you, but do you really believe it? They lied about what their mediaplayer reports when it phones home - they could be lying about what goes into a crash report.
Presuming they are honest - they could still be mistaken, would not be first time that the marketing side didn't talk to the technical side either. It might hold passwords and logins in i/o buffers - it might hold chunks of spreadsheets or any other application data too.
Either way - what do you think the chances are that they do anything to protect the data they receive? Especially if they don't think it is at all security critical? They certainly don't make any promises about using good security practices.
Its entirely possible that MS and/or some big brother like the NSA uses crash reports for espionage - industrial or political. Even if they don't, if someone within MS is able to get easy access to the data, he might be selling it to your competitors - or to credit-card fraudsters in Slovenia.
Sure - your chances of being personally effed over by sending in crash reports to MS are probably miniscule. But the benefits to you are even smaller, so why even bother?
My OEM computer can temporarily become useless? (Score:1)
Actually, it's not about quality at all. (Score:1, Interesting)
A funny number (Score:1)
The hardware world is a disaster... (Score:4, Insightful)
What we really need are some standard reference models for PCs, and (this is critical) we need hardware manufacturers to stop treating driver interfaces as intellectual property and completely, totally OPEN their interface for software developers. Of course, like I said above, people vote with their pocketbook, and people don't seem to get that worked up about this. They'll continue to buy nVidia or ATI or whoever because the cards really do have great performance, and they'll just suffer with the problems that come with proprietary interfaces. I mean, it's amazing to me - when I buy hardware, it should be OPEN. What you did under the hood is one thing, but how the system interfaces with it - OPEN. My old retro computers came with SCHEMATICS, for crying out loud.
OK, I'm off my soapbox. Just don't think that the driver world will get any better this way, because it won't. Until we're dealing with known, documented hardware and a more elegant driver architecture, a crashin' we will go.
Why should a bad driver crash an OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.dpbsmith.com/)
Sure, for performance reasons it may be advantageous to let a driver have free access to the hardware. But I don't see any logical reason why it has to be that way... just as I don't see any law of physics that says memory leaks and buffer overruns are unavoidable.
But, why, exactly, should a faulty display driver, say, cause any fundamental problems? Why doesn't the operating system intervene? Why shouldn't a driver malfunction just cause a brief screen flicker... followed by the OS detecting that something improper has happened, followed by a driver and hardware reset, continue merrily on its way? Yes, I do recognize that a driver that is directly fundamental to a system's own operation--specifically a disk driver--is likely to be more difficult. Still, disk drives are fundamentally unreliable at the analog level, but layers of CRC checking and bad sector remapping hide the problems almost completely. Why couldn't this be true at the disk driver level? So that a bum driver causes only a performance loss and some retries, not total disaster?
As with so much of modern PC practice, this seems to be a case of "because we've always done it that way." It is convenient for Microsoft to point fingers elsewhere, but in the final analysis they are responsible for the user experience. Instead of painting a scarlet letter on bad drivers, why don't they design the OS to tolerate them better?
Re:Why should a bad driver crash an OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://geocities.com/h2428/tzvetan.htm | Last Journal: Wednesday November 22 2006, @10:38PM)
Some driver bugs can be averted by moving drivers into user mode - this is especially true for drivers that do not talk to hardware directly, but these are not interested cases. Drivers which do not talk to hardware (e.g. drivers for USB devices) should not be in the kernel in the first place, so it is just a case of bad design.
The interesting and important drivers are ones that do talk to hardware. Unfortunately they are the ones that cannot be made completely safe. A driver can program its DMA controller to overwrite the entire system RAM, or it can set the device up to lock the bus. There are ways to avoid these problems (with significant increase in cost and complexity), but not in PC hardware - it is simply not worth it. Would you rather have a PC which hangs up once every week, or one that costs ten times more ? If you answered the latter, then you don't need a PC!
The subject of microkernels has been discussed to death. I think that everybody agrees that microkernels are slower, so it becomes a question of economics again: People would you rather have a PC which crashes once every week that one which is twice slower.
Lastly, I am going to say that in my opinion microkernels increase complexity disproportionately, and complexity leads to bugs, so they are not a scalable solution. Of course this point is debatable.
This will NOT work (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one (Score:1)
(http://www.sifnt.net/)
"hmm, they're going to rate the users now?" (ie; drivers of the pc)
From TFA... (Score:1)
(http://www.clan-mac.com/)
ATI (Score:1)
ATI was lauded in the past for (finally) evolving to a monolithic driver set (catalysts) back in the day, however they still have work to do.
Overall I think this is a fantastic idea. This is excellent motivation for driver manufacturers as the system is no longer binary.
Too much nonsenical data. (Score:2, Insightful)
On paper, it sounds pretty good.
But, to me anyway, here's why it may not work:
1. It presumes the problem is faulty driver coding. Does it take into account other applications open at the time? What about tricky conflicts? I've been around enough to see MANY applications that kill drivers, like Word causing video driver crashes. Who's fault?
2. Will Microsoft pore over all this data? Drivers crash for
3. Will the data contain enough information for the OEM, who really gets a bunch of MS-formatted data, get enough real information to solve the problem?
4. According to TFA, this only works on the "Premium" edition of Vista. In that version, drivers have to be certified. If "Premium" proves to not be a best-seller, how many OEMs will bother with certification? I still have to click through "non-certified" dialogues in XP today.
Also, I suppose it should be said that this is yet more information that MS will get about users' computers.
Re:Too much nonsenical data. (Score:5, Informative)
1. It presumes the problem is faulty driver coding. Does it take into account other applications open at the time? What about tricky conflicts? I've been around enough to see MANY applications that kill drivers, like Word causing video driver crashes. Who's fault?
Yes, it does account for other applications open at the time. If you look at the data that will be sent to Microsoft, you will see (among other things) a process list. That aside, drivers shouldn't crash, regardless of any requests that applications may make of them. If an application is causing a driver to crash, the driver probably missed a bounds check, screwed up its state machine, or who knows. Something that should be caught and handled, in any case.
2. Will Microsoft pore over all this data? Drivers crash for
3. Will the data contain enough information for the OEM, who really gets a bunch of MS-formatted data, get enough real information to solve the problem?
These two questions contradict each other. In #2, you say that there will be too much information. In #3, you are worried that there won't be enough. Which is it? Either way, you should take a look at the contents of an error report sometime; they are quite detailed, just not in plain english. From those 7,500 crash reports, there are definitely going to be some common function pointers that the driver developers can use to look up the offending functions, their arguments, and the state of the other registers on the machine. While the information looks cryptic to the average user, it is very useful to those who can map that hexidecimal data to source code.
4. According to TFA, this only works on the "Premium" edition of Vista. In that version, drivers have to be certified. If "Premium" proves to not be a best-seller, how many OEMs will bother with certification? I still have to click through "non-certified" dialogues in XP today.
Certification does more than just avoid the silly "non-certified" dialog box. Certification isn't cheap; companies who spend the money to go through the certification process have at least shown some commitment to driver quality by getting a third-party to verify best practices. I believe that getting your driver certified also allows you to use the "Certified for Windows" logo on your product, which (probably) has some sway with customers.
What about stable drivers that are just crappy? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I feel Windows has some blame in regards to probs. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never updated my computer drivers via Windows Update. My boss recently asked me why and I showed him on a spare laptop we had.
First of all, Windows kept saying that there where updated drivers for the onboard Realtek AC97 sound card. Problem was, the updated drivers where for the C-Media AC97 drivers. The sound card didn't work when I updated them to the ones Windows recommended.
Then (the big one) Windows kept saying there was an updated driver for the USB mouse I was using (A A-Open Optical Openeye Wheelmouse). The driver it recommended was a A4-Tech driver or something.
Oh boy, did I have fun after that was installed.
I installed the recommended mouse driver and restarted. Instant blue-screen. So I tried to get into safe mode to rollback the driver. Blue screen while booting into safe mode. So now I have to try and recover (or reformat) this laptop due to a dodgey windows update.
My boss was amazed at what Windows Update had done. Why does Windows say there are updated drivers available that don't work? I know better than to trust WU for drivers, but I still have the average home user coming up to me asking why their computer has gone bad after loading the latest windows updates (I tell everyone who asks, only use WU for the critical windows updates, that's all)
Who is to blame for this? The average computer user has no idea what devices are in their computer (Hell, most of them still call the moniter the computer and the computer "the box"). Why does Windows seem to ignore what's listed as installed and working in Device Manager?
A good motivation (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
So, this means (Score:2)
(http://kim.biyn.com/)
So this means that in Windows Vista, we should see driver installers with screens declaring:
"Don't like our drivers? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!"
will feel more useful? (Score:2)
a driver must have been released and in use for at least 120 days
The fact that Microsoft is publicizing this now means the fix was in at least twelve months ago. Anyone with enough market leverage already has their sundry ratings certified on gilt edge legal stock, regardless of quality.
Microsoft has not revealed the exact methodology for determining
How surprising; zero transparency. You get the rating, not the calculation. Microsoft now has yet another large size hammer with which to club whomever into line. Those who, perhaps, would rather not comply exclusively with:
updates must be made available through Windows Update
Yep. Your Genuine Advantage enabled Windows Update. At what point will it become impossible to boot a Microsoft operating system without a broadband uplink?
It's a boon for PHBs; yet another way to cop out when purchasing. Obsolete, overpriced and 'green' rated? Cha-ching. Hell, why not specify this with amendments to SOX and HIPPA!
The one driver that will never get a bad rating... (Score:1)
(http://www.segito.com/)
I don't see this working. (Score:1)
(http://12.183.160.165/~ccfreak2k/index.html | Last Journal: Tuesday October 03 2006, @12:11PM)
Also, what about modified drivers? If I had a utility that hooked into a driver (a bad idea, but tell that to millions of Windows programmers) and caused the driver to crash, wouldn't this create a false positive? I can see this happening especially in video card drivers.
Microsoft to Turn to Driver Quality Ratings System (Score:1)
Hotgaysexnow? (Score:1, Offtopic)
What about power supplies? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.webme-eng.com/)
I still have not figured out why but I have seen people spend several thousand on motherboard, cpu, ram, video cards, hard drives etc but they will put a $40 power supply in the box and then pissed at windows, ati, nvidia, amd, intel etc etc when the system crashes fairly often. The same can be said of cooling.
The other leading cause seems to be stuff like the internet security programs. Darned if I know exactly how they do what they do but they seem to be adept at crashing computers. There are quite a lot of programs that try to hook into how windows operates, screw with drivers etc. From what I understand most of the copy protection stuff you see tries to hook into the cd, ide, etc drivers to try to enforce what it is doing. So if the system crashes does the cdrom driver get nailed or does starforce or whatever other copy protection that screwed things up get nailed? This kind of stuff is actually a good reason to stay away from the games that have almost any copy protection. It is one the reasons I like the MMO style of games. Most of them have no copy protection at all and they don't try to do weird things to windows, play with drivers etc.
So while I would like to see crappy drivers get nailed I suspect that what will end up happening is that the wrong drivers will get blamed since ati, nvidia etc will play by the rules but companies like starforce and other drm stuff won't.
OCA gets over 400,000 crash reports per day (Score:1, Informative)
OEM's like Dell and HP have access to this raw OCA data through contracts with Microsoft and they have the power to determine which hardware vendors are the most reliable based on install base and crash rate. Want to know whether ATI or nVidia display hardware is more reliable for a business desktop? Ask a Dell TAM. Or better yet, just look and see what video cards Dell puts in their most popular high-end systems. When folks crash, they either call up Dell support and Dell loses money, or they call up Microsoft support and Microsoft loses money. Dell and Microsoft want to prevent those calls! If they can reduce support calls due to Video crashes on systems by switching from nVidia to ATI or vice versa, millions of dollars can be saved! The customer being happier is a nice side benifit
Speaking of Display hardware, have you guys heard of CRASH? Graphcis drivers are notorious for crashing and account for about one in five of all crashes reported to OCA! MS developed a neat multi-threading stress tool to compare the reliablity of various video cards. The whitepaper has been available since Apr 30, 2004 at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/tools/CRAS
One Solution and One Solution Only (Score:2, Interesting)
There is only one solution to the whole driver issue, and that is for it to be made law that driver software source code must be made available -- otherwise, the hardware can't legally be sold.
It's already technically illegal for manufacturers to keep this information secret anyway, since the rightful owner of a piece of hardware is by definition privy to any secret that it may embody. But in these paranoid times, when everybody is concerned about bogus "intellectual property", they won't change their ways without legislation. The fact is that their near competitors are already probing their products pretty severely. And they've got better-equipped labs than the average Fred in the Shed.
I'd also incorporate a "reasonable force" provision, granting anybody the explicit right to publish the results of reverse-engineering {which I consider to be a forcible technique, although less so than kidnapping the CEO's daughter demanding the driver source code for a ransom} that they may have conducted on hardware that they own in the event that the manufacturer illegally refuses to co-operate. The onus would be upon the manufacturer to demonstrate that a more benign method existed for obtaining the relevant information.
Needless to say, this would benefit all operating systems, not just Windows.
You forgive me if I don't jump for joy over this (Score:2)
Better idea (Score:1)
Now that's some motivation to fix your crap =)
a matter of mutual respect (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://tom.digitalelite.com/)
Microsoft is stingy with their knowledge. They release only what they want on their terms in their own way as they please. I can't, in good conscience, participate in that sort of relationship---one where I give everything I have to help them make a better product and they in turn give back just enough to justify charging me for the 'right' to lease (because software ownership is apparently so 90's) their software back. If I'm lucky, the software I've leased back from them may possibly have a fix to the problem I reported or it may not. Depending on the problem, I may never know. It's not like I am privy to their code or even their coding methodology. I will give to Microsoft to the extent that they give to me. And for the record Microsoft never 'gave' me anything. I have no investment in seeing them succeed under their current model.
In contrast, when I submit a bug report to a Free software project, I get the name of a guy assigned to the bug, I can log in and see the bug tracking discussion, the fix is there for me to review, the new version with fix included is given back to me free of charge and free of stipulations. I feel like a real participant in the process. I feel like Gnome's success or Evolution's success is both partly to do with me and directly beneficial to me.
Submitting bugs to Microsoft feel the same to me as submitting CD track info to CDDB. I give them info, they charge me to get it back.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
This would be awesome for GNU/Linux and the BSDs! (Score:2, Insightful)
Great (Score:1)
ATI is going down... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday December 01 2003, @10:53PM)
Damn it, my All-in-wonder Radeon 7500 still doesn't work as advertised after 4 years!
I for one think this is a stroke of genius (Score:2)
(http://www.bobpitch.com/)
99% of all crashes and malfunctions my PC experiences are down to dodgy drivers.
I've had months of fun trying to get my NV4 mobo to play nice with my X2 for large USB data transfers and it's driven me up the wall - wish I'd never bothered upgrading.
I envision a future where I can find a review for the latest graphics card and there'll be a little automatically updating graph at the bottom that tells me how many crashes were reported to MS from people using driver X on it.
In fact this sortof data manipulation could enable you to do fancy stuff, like enter in your current driver config (automatically) and then enter a proposed upgrade - and there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to tell you whether you can expect more of less crashes.
I guess the only missing piece to this jigsaw is reporting to MS when you install a driver (I'd be happy to) - the number of crashes reported to MS is only important if they'll also let you know how many people have installed a driver and not had it crash on them.
Another tangent of thought would allow MS to report to manufacturers crash dumps for a particular combination of drivers/hardware that is proving to be problematic. PCs aren't buggy because of MS, or often from a driver maker alone - but rather than quite gargantuan combination of drivers people have installed (contrasted with say Apple, or even Dell where driver combinations are much fewer and can be tested to death before release).
Tagging (Score:1)
Driver Rollback & System Restore (Score:2)
(http://concurrentthinking.blogspot.com/)
As if people even pay attention to the logo certification status anyway. If I had a nickel for everything I've installed that Windows warned me did not have logo certification, well, I'd have a lot of nickels. Some of those warnings were even for Nvidia, stuff. Of course I installed it anyway. If people spend money on some hardware or software, a little warning about something obscure like driver certification is not going to deter most people from installing it anyway. And regardless, if something goes wrong, there's always driver rollback and system restore....
Linus should do the same (Score:1)
That way you would know when a driver (eg. i810 on X11) takes down the whole system.
I'm really sick of this problem and having absolutely no way to fix it.
At least it would bring focus on the shitty driver writers.
Ben
Re:'Long overdue'...or 'same shit, different day'? (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it already. Six months after Vista ships the iPod will be flagged as the worst device and lose it's windows certification.