It has long been said that one of Microsoft’s greatest challenges has been to support the wild and unpredictable PC hardware market, stemming from the fact that unlike Apple, Microsoft has little control over the hardware that its OS comes to reside upon. True or not, one thing is certain: a bad driver can turn an otherwise stable system into a nightmare. To help put an end to this, Microsoft is turning to a Driver Quality Rating system that it hopes will motivate both OEMs and device manufacturers to increase their commitments to driver quality.
Inside Microsoft’s New Driver Quality Rating System
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’d be interesting to see, if such a thing exists, a breakdown of why Windows XP for instance crashes. Is it due to poor drivers or poor OS design.
Most of the time it’s the drivers when a computer crashes completely and utterly, not the OS. This is true for all OSes, not just Windows.
I would have suspected as such, though to avoid flame bait I sat on the fence.
Such a breakdown would be impossible because it’d require those with faulty drivers to find the faults and admit to them (which would practically imply they’d fix them, and then we wouldn’t be in this mess).
It’s usually drivers…
I’ll never forget when Microsoft released this statement.
“Third-party code causes half of Windows crashes”
Third-part code being drivers, programs etc. Meaning…… the other half of Windows crashes is because of the OS itself?
Edited 2006-06-15 03:23
That’s pretty realistic in the Win9X days.
What happened to WHQL or is it an entirely different thing? I remember my Matrox drivers having the phrase “WHQL Certified” when I last used Windows 2000.
It was just to rip off some money from driver vendors, and not to assure quality (what it was told it would be for).
Now with the rating thing Microsoft admits that WHQL just didn’t do what it should
I can’t give you exact breakdowns, because they’re proprietary, but OS developers do indeed have statistics on fault causes. Different companies have different levels of accuracy and ability to track, of course.
One thing to be aware of is that there are (at least) two ways to slice the pie. How many bugs or how much downtime.
Another is that the answer varies by region, mostly due to the quality of AC power available. Where AC power is poor, both metrics are dominated by power related problems, both directly due to power failures and indirectly due to induced hardware failure because of the power.
There are others, such as intended use of device and level of memory protection. . .
That said, the most common cause of bugs capable of crashing modern OSes is poor parameter checking, (which exhibits itself in C as buffer overflow, most commonly,) and it’s pretty uniformly distributed across the OS code.
The second most common cause is resource starvation: trying to do too much with too little hardware, which is more a problem of picking the wrong tool than of poor design, but very few OSes degrade well in the face of resource starvation. (That’s party of why denial of service attacks can be so effective.)
The third most common cause is improper data initialization or reuse. In C this most commonly shows up as derferencing pointers that are invalid. Again, it’s pretty uniformly distributed across the OS.
However, improper data use tends to cause spectacular driver failures that also tend to be difficult to debug. For complex reasons this is most likely to happen in third party drivers. So drivers get their bad reputation, but they’re not really any more error prone than the rest of the system.
Friend installed vista yesterday on his new intel dual core 64, easiest install ever, works, looks great and then hits the suspend button and a non re-entrant sound driver for a common as dirt chipset brings the whole house crashing down.
It is probably being re-engineered such that any driver update will force you to install WGA components against your will. And to install the WGA, you need to install the .net framework vX.X update. And to install that, you need to update to the MSI package updater v X.X and on and on and on…Until you have no clue what your computer is doing.
Then for the drivers, probably only manufacturers that pay Microsoft for their ‘certified’ stamp will only get a high rating.