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Classic tip · Hardware
Microsoft moving display drivers outside the kernel
In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows... Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in "userland". Display adapter/driver problems ha…
In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows... Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in "userland". Display adapter/driver problems have been one of the greatest source of instability and crashes for some time. That should make for a noticable improvement.
Update -- 12/17/05 --
Not exactly according to Microsoft. They're not exactly pulling the Windows Presentation Framework (formerly named Avalon) out of kernelspace. Here's the response from Microsoft....
"Because WPF is largely written in managed code on the common language runtime, it never ran in kernel mode. There are elements of WPF (called the MIL) that are written in unmanaged code, but that code also largely runs (and always has run) in user mode. Insofar as WPF needs to touch kernel mode stuff (e.g., drivers), it interacts with them through the existing DirectX APIs. The user mode and kernel mode aspects of the WPF architecture haven't changed,"