Re: why panic(9) ?

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Nils Holland <nh_at_tisys.org> wrote:
> C. P. Ghost wrote:
>
>> As far as I know, Windows NT is a microkernel arch, and
>> faulty drivers, often provided by external vendors would not
>> bring that system (as much as we hate or despise its
>> Windows OS personality that runs on top of it) to a complete halt.
>
> I don't know ... when Windows crashes (I'm no fan of it either, but anyway)
> and you ask Microsoft about it, then it's most of the time an external
> driver that is responsible. Graphics card driver seem to be the cause most
> often, but other stuff as well.

(...)
> Greetings,
> Nils

a) NT isn't really a microkernel; most drivers run in kernelspace and
can happily mess things up if they fail.
b) Graphics drivers are actually one of the things they've fixed
(well, re-fixed; this was also the case in 3.51) - from Vista and
onwards they mostly live in userspace. (I've had the graphics driver
crash on me a few times - it's restarted automatically, and all that
happens is that the screen goes black for some seconds. It's kind of
impressive.)

More on topic, I can only agree with the majority - failing fast is a
feature, both to mess things up as little as possible, and to make
diagnostics and later fixing easier.

-- 
Daniel Nebdal