Windows does not have drivers on demand. [LWN.net]

Windows does not have drivers on demand.

Posted Sep 13, 2004 10:10 UTC (Mon) by dps (subscriber, #5725)
Parent article: Improving Linux Driver Installation (O'ReillyNet)

Having actually tried installing windows and the dubious experience of using it to some extent, you rapidly discover either it works or you have *major* problems---much worse than the problems in linux. Even if you actually know the chipset drivers rarely tell you what they support.

I would also note that windows requires you to install drivers for almost everything manually, whereas linux has often worked out what my new hardware is and loaded an appropriate module automagically. Frequently I have installed hadrware and it has just worked on linux, which has *never* happenned for me on windows.

Making things even easier would be nice, but project utopia seems to involve everyone having ulimited unmetered internet access which is simply not true here. Until recently I only had pay-per-minute dailup access :-( I am also worried about getting LKM rootkits widely installed shortly after someone has owned the central repository.

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Windows does not have drivers on demand.

Posted Sep 13, 2004 16:29 UTC (Mon) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

I belive that the DoD centralized model, in a world more and more distributed is just,... a different approach,... and noboby should worry too much about it,... DoD have to evolve because a central repository for everything drivers just would not stick.

Thought, the greatest value of project Utopia, is that it discuss matters that *ARE ACTUALY THE MOST IMPORTANT* in the Open Source area today, inspite the corporate world dont give it the attention it should receive, because it is the heart of "world wide" IT domination.

Perhaps is just me,... but i sense a certain fear from the corporate lidership of Open Source of a certain corporation that dominates the IT paradigma and that is knowned to retaliet against thier own business partners, no matter who, if someone threatens their dominium... and almost everybody *have* to make business with the monopoly...

So project Utopia is IMO the most important one in Open Source on the last years,... because with SMT(hyperthreading)+ CMS(multicore) processors and with NUMA support craved in the chipsets, like the Opteron ones, it seems reasonabily that scalability is heading troward the more and more integration of functionality like VoIP, IM and P2P networks and not the number of physical processores supported.

Windows does not have drivers on demand.

Posted Sep 16, 2004 22:46 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It sounds like you may be comparing apples and oranges. There are many steps in getting new drivers going for new hardware. The first step is getting the code on your disk, and I think that's the problem the article is about. A subsequent step is getting your system configured so that it uses a driver that's on your disk with a particular piece of new hardware. A third is loading the driver from the disk into the kernel so you can actually execute it.

I have little experience with Windows or with the Linux systems that are meant to provide equivalent ease of use (Red Hat Linux, etc.), but from what I've seen, they look pretty much the same.

Both come with large quantities of drivers, so there's a good chance there's no driver to get -- unless you want something up to date.
Both notice new hardware at boot time and ask you if you'd like the system to automatically find and configure a driver for it.
Neither will acquire a driver from the Internet if you don't have one already.
Windows will take a driver from a CD that came with the hardware. I don't know if Red Hat can do that (not much point, since hardware doesn't come with linux drivers on CD).

Do others have different driver experiences?