Windows Update Is Getting Automatic Rollbacks For Faulty Drivers (pcworld.com) 43
Microsoft is adding a Windows Update feature called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery that can automatically roll back faulty drivers to a previously known-good version without waiting for hardware makers or users to fix the problem manually. PCWorld reports: The way faulty drivers work today is that the hardware partner is responsible for pushing an updated driver, or the end user is responsible for manually uninstalling the problematic driver. "This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period," says the blog post. With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft will be able to remotely trigger a rollback of the faulty driver to a previously "known-good" version of the driver via the Windows Update pipeline. Microsoft says that testing and verification of Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery will continue until August this year, aiming to deliver this feature to Windows PCs starting in September.
Amazing (Score:2)
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of just having quality control on drivers that get applied by Windows Update, they've decided to tack on a bunch of bullshit to remediate shitty drivers being auto-installed by Windows Update.
And then they wonder why everyone hates Windows.
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To be fair they can't realistically test all the hardware configurations out there. They could have systems with AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but how many different generations, how many different configurations of GPU architecture, memory, power management? How many different brand SSDs, going back how many years?
Then you have the interaction between the integrated Intel GPU and the discrete Nvidia GPU, when a particular chipset is used. The number of possible configurations grows exponentially every year, and peo
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
This happens so often, apparently, they need to engineer this whole complex subsystem and storage infrastructure to take care of this problem.
Well yes this happens very often. In fact the only kernel panics I've ever had on Linux were dodgy drivers. And the single most common problem on Macs are "GPU Panics" due to drivers.
It turns out when you have a piece of code that runs in a very low level written by god knows who, then you need a way to manage them not screwing up your system.
Fun fact: we wrote our own USB driver for a team project at university, one of the most frustrating things was waiting for the computer to reboot so we could have another go.
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Such a strange thing to say when I made the 5th post and 1st reply in an open discussion forum. Your head really is just a container to hold your teeth isn't it.
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Your head really is just a container to hold your teeth isn't it.
LOL, And I actually did laugh out loud too, I am stealing that one :) Thanks for cheering me up.
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Hey pay it forward, I myself stole it from someone on reddit :-)
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Indeed. Instead of doing proper testing and good architecture and coding. MS has no long-term future.
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A "known good version"... from MS's own database of driver's that it declared work, or to the version you had that worked before their new driver broke everything?
Why are they remotely activating anything on my computer?
Most likely, this is only for Win11... which is why I'm glad I stuck with 10.
Couldn't they just have rewritten the driver install routine to do a quick system restore snapshot of before new driver just before the install, and give you the option to use the snapshot if the new one doesn't wor
Blue Screens (Score:5, Interesting)
Going back to the pre-XP days where drivers were less isolated and responsible for a lot Blue Screens. Drivers are a perennial place where Microsoft doesn't have a lot of control, but greatly effects the experience. I am honestly a little surprised that it took this long to try to come up with ways to gain more control than just signing.
As with any new managed experience, the value added versus how much people have to fight the management will be an open question.
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When a provider manages something beyond the control of the customer is a managed experience. Like having an MSP ("Managed" Service Provider) [wikipedia.org] maintaining your drivers would add is also "managed". Or how UX or User Experience [wikipedia.org] is how someone interacts with a service.
But undoubtedly in this case Microsoft is running a service which managing drivers beyond the control of the user and is then a "managed driver experience". I didn't come up with those terms and if you want non-technical commentary on news that do
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Do you really say "lol"?
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WHQL signing was a huge leap forward from the shitty old days of driver installation Russian roulette.
For some reason it's not doing as good a job as it used to though. Maybe they should look into why that is instead of bolting on a band-aid?
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Maybe it's just my experience, but WHQL while undoubted better still wasn't the perfect panacea. I've had my share of rollbacks and plenty of drivers that never hit the service because of the extra effort. I think there's a little damned if you do and damned if you don't with anything hardware related being out of their control.
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The second thing you do is bitch about crashes that wouldn't happen if you use drivers that pass even the mediocre quality standards represented by WHQL certification.
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Re:Blue Screens (Score:5, Interesting)
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And why was that? Because WHQL certification costs money, and they knew they couldn't pass. So they give you a shitty bare-bones driver to be able to put the badge on the box, and if you want all the functionality, you have to run a shitty crashy driver that can't pass even the barest of quality tests.
Back in the day, it used to be said that if you are running a signed driver, you're running an old driver. That changed when Microsoft started making it harder to install unsigned drivers, and organizations
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The more prominent one was any graphics driver. If you wanted an up to date graphics driver it was not WHQL certified. If you chose the WHQL certified driver you almost always had problems playing newly released games. This applied to both NVIDIA and ATI back in the day (not sure about some of the smaller players).
WHQL started in 1995. It was 2011 before NVIDIA started WHQL certifying its "Game Ready" drivers on day 1 - the latest ones released to support major new game titles. Before 2011 there was a good
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I honestly thought that Microsoft already tried an automated driver rollback "feature" back in the early Windows Vista days.
I vaguely remember it breaking more issues than it resolved.
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Today, when a driver published through Windows Update is identified after distribution to have quality issues, the remediation path relies on the hardware partner to submit an updated driver — or on end users to manually uninstall the problematic driver themselves. This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period.
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Drivers are still not isolated on Windows - they're still kernel mode blobs.
Microsoft has however done a lot of work trying to improve driver quality - WHQL and driver signing. The only reason Windows doesn't blue screen so much is basically that Microsoft has managed to raise the quality of drivers to the point where drivers just aren't so buggy.
Another reason is well, Microsoft took over a lot of the driver development, things like USB and such have class drivers so many drivers don't have to be written t
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Right, but... driver version 583 works on a TitanX, driver version 584 doesn't... there, test result... 584 still isn't going to work on an MSI, or a Gigabyte motherboard.
That driver either works or doesn't work for that card, regardless of the motherboard and DDR combinations.
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Microsoft has been steadily fixing this, but it's taken decades.
Vista started moving some drivers out of the kernel, and providing crash recovery for the ones that couldn't be extracted. Subsequent versions pushed it even further, to the point where in Windows 11 it's basically as little as possible without sacrificing massive amounts of performance running in the kernel, and most of what is in there is provided by Microsoft. Even things like graphics drivers are mostly outside the kernel now.
next up reboot loops (Score:3)
This is Microsoft, we can expect.
1. Driver updates.
2. Driver bad, driver rolls back.
3. Driver needs update, go to step 1.
Re:next up reboot loops (Score:5, Funny)
Or you'll end up with this situation:
Game XYZ won't run because it says that your video card drivers are out of date ...and suddenly you wish that you bought a Playstation 5 instead.
You update them
The game crashes anyway with a different graphic driver error because it's bug ridden launch day garbage
The drivers roll back
And Game XYZ won't run again
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3. Driver needs update, go to step 1.
Or back in reality, Microsoft already has an active process for blacklisting KB releases so they don't automatically get reinstalled. Come on man, so much on this company to shit on, at least put some effort into making it realistic.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm rolling back your system. (Score:1)
Recall v2? (Score:2)
Latest Is Not Always Greatest (Score:2)
According to most manufacturers, the highest-quality driver is always the latest one. However, enshittification tells us that the latest things are often lower quality. And while that's not always the case, enshittification co
Who's creating the drivers? (Score:2)