More Whql feedback
I was reading the comments on
craigrow's blog about WHQL signing and I saw a rather interesting comment from Will Dean
"
Acheiving WHQL signing is difficult, slow, expensive, and backed by an extremely poorly documented test suite "
The expensive part of the WHQL certification isnt the actual cost from Microsoft (which I mentioned
here is only $250). It's the cost of developing a quality driver, it is difficult work to write a driver that properly hibernates, resumes from sleep, runs on multiproc machines and all the other tortures that modern computer systems have to deal with. The poster also comments about buggy test suites and other difficulties of getting drivers WHQL tested, and if you have a bug, file an issue and I'm sure it will get looked at.
There are a few other things that I can think of that would make the driver experience in Windows better.
- Get outta my kernel!
- Very few things need to be in the kernel anymore and hopefuly with Microsoft Windows Vista alot less things will be. Some things getting the boot:
- Printer drivers: Due to the legacy of NT having kernel mode GDI printer drivers slowly crept into the kernel, now they are slowy creeping back out:)
- Other lower performance devices: With the advent of the User Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) alot of devices wont need kernel access, while I'm not sure of the performance cost, most things that are not sensitive to increased latency and have intense bandwidth requirements probably can hang out in UserMode now, where a crash just stops the device from working and not the whole system
While I've had issues with the technology, Bluetooth did it correctly. - When bluetooth was designed it did more than spec the transmitter specification it specified both the USB and PCI specifications, allowing one driver to basically work with all the devices. This makes sense as it removes the need of the hardware vendor to write drivers reducing both the development cost of a new piece of hardware as well as a large portion of the support. Several devices worth like this now, AC97 sound cards, most hard drive controlers, 1394 contollers, HID devices and more I'm suer I don't know about.
On a side note, The poster commented on the lack of ability to post comments on this blog. I haven't disabled the ability to comment so if you are having problems, send a comment and I'll try to find out whats going on.
--Tripp
