Is MS encouraging sloppy device driver programming?
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
Ben I think that refers to the size in MB of various device drivers that come with the OS distribution. Possibly, that also includes the drivers on that OS's site update Nish
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
I can only believe this is the MS way of telling driver developers "Go ahead, we need bloated software to justify the need for half a gig of RAM just to run the basic OS. If you follow our lead we are no longer the only party to bash for this bloat!". Could it be that Rational is to develop drivers (hey, it would be faster than to do Rose in user-mode, right? - At least, hacked correctly it would display no CPU usage!).
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Ben I think that refers to the size in MB of various device drivers that come with the OS distribution. Possibly, that also includes the drivers on that OS's site update Nish
Kind of like, one CD for the OS and one for the drivers ;) Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers Well of course! If you want the naked-dancing-gyrating Angelina Jolie mouse cursor the drive has to be 500mb. Unless all you want to see are pixels... ;p Ben in the future we will be loading applications of 5g's off a dime sized disk and not even batting an eye lid. Imagine if in the 286 days someone had said "hey DOS 3 requires 200 megabytes!". They would have freaked. Every year the bloat gets bigger and the hard disks get bigger and we complain but not hard enough :) regards, Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa "The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love, and be loved in return" - Moulin Rouge "In other words, the developer is dealing with an elephant, the accountant is dealing with a bunny rabbit." by Stan Shannon - 16/10/2001
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
In user mode a programmer can address up to 2 GB, sometimes 3 en even go all the way to 64GB (64-bit systems or 32-bit systems with some address extension scheme). I suppose you only need that amount of addressable memory when writing Database applications or running huge simulations. Writing my daily dose of device drivers, can't imagine to put an entire database in system mode but I'll bet there are some alien freaks out there that want to do just that... A device driver that uses 1MB of allocated memory (paged and non-paged) is a HUGE driver. I don't like the MS driver scheme. It's too restrictive. Peace, Gert. -------------------------------------------------- If my messages appear curt, I apologize. I try to be brief to save your time as well as mine. --------------------------------------------------
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So I was just browsing MSDN this, thanks to daylight savings, not so early morning. When I ran across this article: Windows XP: Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPKernel/XPKernel.asp I must say that it's an interesting read, but I did a double take when I saw the following: <snip> Larger Device Drivers and System Space Windows 2000 limited device drivers to 220MB (drivers were limited to 100MB on Windows NT 4.0). Device drivers on Windows XP can now be up to 960MB in size. </snip> If I understand it correctly this means that someone can write a device driver that takes up 960MB of my HD! :eek: -- Someone please tell me I'm reading this wrong. Who needs to write 960MB drivers?!? For that mater, who's writing 100MB drivers?!? The way I figure it, if you need 100+ MB for a driver, maybe you need to redesign the hardware. Next thing you know, well have 500MB mouse drivers :mad: Ben Burnett "It's all absolutely devastatingly true -- except the bits that are lies" - Douglas Adams
Well, no. Remember that a program (including device drivers) allocate memory above and beyond that which is stored on the hard drive. Consider that some kinds of drivers (such as file system drivers) can allocate huge amounts of memory for caching and other things. One could write a custom filesystem driver which created a static 500MB cache in memory for your data acquisition project. This isn't for normal, run of the mill devices, but rather custom situations. -- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?