Re: Driver Model 2 Proposal - Linux Kernel Performance v Usability

[Stan Bubrouski <stan@ccs.neu.edu>]

Dale P. Smith wrote:

>
> The only windows system that I have seen that was reliable (unless the 
> people there were lying to me) was a big ibm netfinity system.  I 
> believe it was stable because it didn't use any extra harware or 
> drivers except what ibm had installed on the box.
>
I dunno I had Win2k running with only 2 crashes for 3 years on a
Dell OptiPlex GX300 866MHz SMP system.  Believe it or not for
the first 2 years I never had a full system crash.  I left it on for months
at a time.  That doesn't mean windows is stable though.  It means
for my particular setup it was.  I'm probably one of the few people
I know on campus who haven't had to had to format there windows
and start over several times.   The biggest problem is the windows
registry, once it becomes corrupt unless you have a backup you've
lost all your settings.  This is horrible by design.  Any minor corruption
or registry permissions problems can cause a system to go down
faster than Jennifer Lopez.

> What I'm saying is that most of the problems with windows are from 
> flakey, half-baked drivers and dll's form third parties.  I've got no 
> hard numbers, just my personal experiences.
>
All my problems have been flakey, half-baked drivers and DLLs from
Microsoft, so I cannot relate.

> Binary onlyt drivers are bad.  Source drivers are good.  THat's just 
> the way it is.
>
Agreed.

> -Dale
>