| The Advancement of Windows: Narayanan Ganapathy - Windows Vista IO |
| From the kernel to the shell, Windows Vista is a very different OS than XPSP2. How so? Here, Charles interviews Architect Narayanan Ganapathy whose team of highly skilled engineers write the Windows IO system, driver frameworks and related technologies. So, what, exactly, is new in Windows Vista with regard to IO? What does it mean, exactly, to users and developers? Tune in. Learn. |
Always the eager one to learn, I cannot deny that this video has a certain potential to annoying me. I'm not of particular naivete but still do believe that
- video is a sub-optimal medium for providing in depth technical information
- Techie staff should not be getting into marketing the same way I would not feel really 100% comfortable, should know-it-all(-better) Microsoft marketing department decide to indulge in driver development in the near future.
I'll try to explain more in depth what it is precisely, that I find so annoying. This essentially boils down the fact that the whole Vista team seems to be in a state of denial or how else would you describe the official Mantra "most advanced OS, most secure OS", etc. Sorry for shortening the actual quotes but you've most likely heard them ad nauseam and probably half the way back :-)
Don't get me wrong though. I'd like to state very clearly that I'm running Vista on my machines after being in the Vista beta programme for more than a year. I'm still in the Server 2008 beta and without disclosing anything I'd like to say that I really like Vista as well as Server 2008. But that should not make blind towards complaints. I'll name a few that surface on the internet regularily but hardly ever (in case of driver behaviour or architecture) get proper attention. Just to name a couple
- What's really that advanced with an IO subsystem which can be abused that easily to get the machine to a grinding halt. Don't believe it? Just subscribe to 200 RSS feeds using the MS feed store, wait for the msfeedsync service to start updating your feeds, lean back and enjoy. There will not be very much more you're going to be be able to do for the next 10-15 minutes). msfeedsync is only one example for IO intensive software that hogs down the whole machine, thereby introducing this Windows 98 feeling of helplessness that we all thought, would be gone for good. This was run and measured on my dual core Pentium E4300 machine with 2GB RAM.
- Also got a 2GB machine? Even 4GB? Try that one. Disable all autostart stuff you do not really, really need start outlook, word and excel. Start task manager (best use the sysinternals one), take pencil and paper (or write a short program) to check on allocated virtual memory. Remember the fact that virtual mem is mapped via page table entries to physical memory or marked as not present, in which case the processor generates a page fault exception, the OS traps, it loads the page in question from non-volatile storage (usually a hard disk) and restarts the offending operation. Any idea why this scenario still introduces heavy paging activity with 2GB
- A proliferating "fox and grapes" mentality, withdrawing behind (sometimes only perceived) authority instead of getting back in touch with reality.
I certainly admire the MS Kernel development team(s) and Vista is an impressive piece of software engineering. But it still shares one attribute with all other non-trivial software in the known universe: it's not perfect and that's good news in fact because face it guys, would it be perfect, you'd loose your jobs. And anyway, please try to re-introduce the variable 'usability' into your equations for "technical advancedness" calculation - even fellow developers might mainly be interested in what actually reaches them and not so much in the big theore
tical picture.
Please subsequently find the link to the aforementioned video...
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