It's 2016 and we're still doing drivers in kernel mode :(

Andrew Tanenbaum's arguments for microkernels still ring just as true today as they always did.

For USB devices it would be theoretically possible: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/drivers/wd...

A kindle is just a USB drive, though. And that driver is probably kernel mode for performance reasons.

Windows is probably the desktop OS with better support for user mode drivers, still many developers still make them kernel mode, even if not needed.

As for micro-kernels, at least they have won in the embedded and real time space, with the likes of QNX, L4 and a few others.

Funny thing is that NT is micro-kernel (to some degree at least), but Microsoft keep moving things in and out of kernel space with each release as they are weighing performance vs stability.

Given the new crash-proof video driver architecture since Windows 8 and the variety of USB devices and their associated complexity, I had assumed the USB stack would be equally crash-proof by now. Isn't that the case?

I recall they did a major overhaul like that for audio drivers too.

It's generally pretty "easy" to overhaul the graphics driver layer and get everyone to rewrite their drivers - the graphics card vendors work closely with Microsoft in the first place, and there's only a very small handful of them. USB, not so much.

USB is also a very ambiguous protocol. Observe the amount of problems device suspend on Linux was until someone noticed that the one minute mentioned in the spec was a recommendation rather than a rule.

I have had QNX drivers crash in such a way as to bring down the entire microkernel before. Address space separation doesn't completely resolve the problem, but it does make it much rarer.

IMHO microkernels - and isolation in general - are just workarounds for sub-par processes elsewhere that leads to barely-working code. Fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

I'd be willing to bet a fair bit of money the underlying problem is caused by third party software, likely AV. Could make sense, given in the mini dumps the crash happens right as the Kindle is mounting as a disk.

Perhaps it's not this time, but I personally think Microsoft should do a better job of naming and shaming when third party drivers/software are responsible for crashes. Maybe even form a special team that looks out for stuff like this on forums, does root cause analysis, and maintains a wall of shame (as well as fixing customer issues).

I get the crash and I have no AV except the default one included with Windows 10. Same symptoms as this guy [0], so likely related to the drivers included in the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition.

Luckily there's a work-around so I can still connect to the Kindle with Calibre; just connect the Kindle _before_ starting Windows, then it will not crash, and also still work as an USB drive. [1]

[0] http://www.tenforums.com/bsod-crashes-debugging/60314-bsod-c...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=F...

I have a Paperwhite and two Windows 10 systems. Works fine on both.

Is your system completely vanilla (mine were fresh installs onto empty drives from official media), or could your OEM have snuck something in?

I'm not saying you're wrong, or that Windows isn't to blame. There just must be more to it than Windows 10 anniversary update + Kindle Paperwhite. Maybe you and others affected have some other thing in common.

I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 in-place. Windows 7 was installed (several years ago) using a clean Windows ISO, I have no OEM/bloatware stuff installed.

I do have iTunes installed which apparently was the issue for some users. Others have also reported the getting the crash without that though. But I don't intend to try uninstalling it and see if that resolves the problem, I connect the Kindle so seldom that the work-around will do for now.

With an install-base the size of Windows 10 you can expect problems to come up but what is worrying is that they shouldn't have existed considering the "open-beta" / windows insiders. At least someone must have tried to plug in a Kindle and reported it / or the telemetry should have picked on it.

A lot of the people I know who own Kindles never connect it to their computers. They literally obtain everything via Amazon or via Amazon's conversion services.

EDIT: now that I think about it, Kindles don't come with power adapters anymore, do they? So users would probably still be connecting the Kindles for charging purposes.

It seems to me this seems to happen a lot more than with previous operating systems. It's quite possible Nadella changed the company's culture from doing less Q&A and "moving fast" instead.

Installing windows 10 was the worst thing I did this year.

My mouse would double click instead of click, had to drop enhanced power mode in using the device manger on every USB port.

I got BSOD when going full screen on youtube - had to disable hardware acceleration.

I got BSOD when pressing F5 in powerpoint....

I lost the ability to open the start menu after SP1 - a problem that exists since windows 8... I had to revert to the previous build.

If the new Microsoft means no QA... I'd rather have the old one....

How old is your PC? Have you run any CPU/Mem/Graphics diagnostics recently? Debugged any of the crash dumps?

These symptoms seem like something might be up with your hardware.

2.5 years, it's a Lenovo W530, with updated video drivers from Nvidia. Run windows 7 just fine, Ubuntu, gaming, multiple VMs. It's a beast, just can't handle windows 10 low quality.

Still doesn't mean that there isn't an underlying issue. I'd say hardware if you did a clean install or drivers if you did an upgrade.

Grab something like WhoCrashed and you may be able to find the culprit

I don't think reading let alone debugging crash dumps is a viable option for most users

No, it definitely isn't. But for most HN readers it is. I'm happy to help anyone who reads this. The last crash dumps for a BSOD are often in c:\windows\MiniDump for a short amount of time after the crash.

What exactly is this "Anniversary Update" anyway?

Windows 10 is supposed to be the last version of Windows. All new features from now on are going to be released in sub-versions of Windows 10, similar to how it is done on OSX.

The first such sub-version release was 1511 (i.e. a build from 2015, November), and this Anniversary Update is version 1607 and happens to be one year after the release of Windows 10, which is why they called it "Anniversary Update".

The name given to the semesterly release of Windows that came out a couple of weeks ago. Previously code-named "Windows Redstone".

Windows 10 SP1 with a fancy name.

It's a bit different to a service packs, service packs didn't usually include features, it's more like 8.1 was to 8.

That was true a very long time ago, but for example Windows XP SP2 added a firewall and Security Center. Big new consumer-oriented features.

And Windows 8.1 was effectively SP1 there too, which added back the start button and other features.

If there's anything Microsoft is consistent about, it's inconsistency.

Keep in mind that win10 is meant to be the last windows version. So that means that they're going to need to get good smaller, higher-frequency updates.

So, what new features does it bring to Windows 10?

You now have the exciting ability to not anymore turn off Cortana!

Well, unless you fancy digging around in the Registry, but yeah, they removed the GUI-toggle for it.

More seriously, though, the biggest thing is that they added Ubuntu-support with this update. The rest of the features are pretty boring.

The new Linux subsystem, ability to package Win32 applications as UWP ones, improvements in the UWP gaming APIs, more desktop features brought into UWP, more application sanboxing...

You can change your default audio output device from the volume icon in the notification area!

A recent Ars article related to Win 10 driver issues: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/window...

Yup, I'm hit by this myself. Ridiculous.

I noticed my laptop fan running louder and longer until I finally updated to Windows 10. Now the fan is silent. Psychological warfare by Microsoft? Surprised more people aren't talking about this.

I didn't update yet because something like that would happen.

Doing proper testing is hard.

That said, my household switched to a mix of Gentoo Linux, EdgeOS and iOS. We do not have things crash when USB devices are attached. :)

That's excellent they meet your needs. It should be mentioned the lack of drivers for Linux is an issue and some of the binary ones available are flaky at best.

That said, my household uses a mix of Linux, Windows 10, various IOT, and Android. I don't have things crash when USB devices are attached; sometimes they just don't work on the *nix machines.

Lack of drivers for Linux? Did I wake up in 1996?

No if using desktops, now laptops....

Ok, so 2006 then. I've had 3 laptops over 4 years and never had a single issue. You ancedotal is just as good as mine.

Your anecodote is not good because it doesn't jive with a very high volume of other anecdotes that can be seen on the Internet. So maybe take a look around?

Anyway, for my own anecdote - I have a five year old Dell XPS L502X that has an Optimus style video card in it - Windows 7, 8 and 10 run beautifully on it with no drivers problems. Meanwhile, any Linux distro I've tried to install directly on the hardware just barfs itself.

It's not anecdotal that support for Linux on some hardware is god awful compared to Windows. If you want a source, I followed this 20-page guide to installing Ubuntu on my SP3 and I still have issues. I had to buy a wired mouse because the Bluetooth drivers are terrible. The networking driver only initiates correctly 50% of the time. I understand that is also anecdotal, but the fact that this guide exists is not ->

http://blog.davidelner.com/dual-booting-ubuntu-14-10-on-the-...

My Dell XPS 13.The high resolution screen and touchscreen have issues. Keyboard still takes fiddling. It's a Linux supported laptop that ships with Ubuntu on the lower definition screen.

So yeah, driver support. It still sucks, just not as bad as 96. Honestly, I remember it better in 96 since the hardware was simpler you could usually get everything to kind of work.

So you want another anecodote?

An Asus Eeebook bought with Ubuntu pre-installed in 2012, everything should work out of the box, right?

Actually no, from the time I bought it until the wlan driver worked properly took around 6 months.

I just kept it and constrained myself to LAN during those months instead of returning the laptop, because I wanted to somehow support GNU/Linux on laptops.

I would expect Gentoo is particularly problematic with regard to recovering from update regressions. I use NixOS where reverting to an older version is trivial.

you have your own ubiquiti routers? how is that working out?

Windows 10 is the reason I switched to Debian. I wonder if others will do the same.

I'm surprised that it was Windows 10 that made you switch. Windows 8 was my biggest disappointment.

Here's what I feel about each Windows release I've used much (1=low, 10=high):

    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+
    | Windows Version | Expectation | Disappointment | Usability |
    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+
    | 3.1             |           5 |              2 |         8 |
    | 3.11            |           7 |              3 |         6 |
    | NT 3.51         |           7 |              5 |         7 |
    | 95              |           6 |              3 |         7 |
    | NT 4.0          |           7 |              3 |         9 |
    | 98              |           7 |              2 |         8 |
    | ME              |           7 |              7 |         6 |
    | XP              |           8 |              3 |         8 |
    | Vista           |           5 |              5 |         4 |
    | 7               |           4 |              3 |         6 |
    | 8               |           6 |              8 |         2*|
    | 10              |           8 |              6 |         4 |
    +-----------------+-------------+----------------+-----------+

* - marred by experience w/Surface RT

From what I've observed, the biggest issues with Windows 10 are policy issues. Forced upgrades, forced telemetry, and deceptive/annoying attempts to get people to upgrade to it from Win7 and Win8.

You missed out on the joy that was Win2k. pretty much XP without the candy gloss. 9x interface, NT stability, and quite solid game support.

Most people skipped Windows 8 or tried it and quickly switched back to 7. And, because Windows 8 wasn't a hostile creature trying to take over your PC, it was pretty easy to choose not to use it. Windows 10 is pretty much just Window 8 excepted it's being forced on users.

NT 4.0 was gold, I wish they would release a version of W10 (Windows NT 9.0?) which has all the goodies and none of the dreck. That way I could test websites in their two entire web browsers without being marketed Office 365.

What is interesting about your numbering system is that your expectation continue to go up (in general) yet your disappointment also kept going up.

I would have expected that expectation would have started going down after each disappointment.

likewise, non-Linux gaming was always the problem for me, however now that VT-d works really very well, you can now virtualise games inside Windows at around 97% native speed.

it was initially a pain to get working, however over the past 12 months the tooling has improved a great deal, in virt-manager you can now assign your graphics cards/sound card/... with 1 or 2 clicks, and it simply works!

MS are free to spy on me playing Starcraft II in a VM, and I try to support Linux with my new purchases wherever possible.

so you use Debian as well? are there already good blog posts or similar on how to get VT-d working? If not, I think you could get quite a few hits with this, at least I would be quite interested once I get to build my next gaming PC. Otherwise I'm a mac user and I just despise not having a POSIX as the host system.

yes, Debian testing, stock everything

I might very well write a blog post, as quite a few people have asked

please do, I am curious especially about the video card (I thought that assigning a card to a vm meant the host system wouldn't be able to use it anymore, so how does it work)?

Besides games I'd love to be able to have a daw working well with asio and so on, as in virtualbox this does not work very well unfortunately (I guess realtime audio is not an easy problem to solve when vms are involved)

I have two video cards (a slightly older one for Linux).

audio was the hardest thing to get working smoothly... I have two soundcards, pass one through to Linux, and have a 5cm cable from the output into the line-in of the second card, which has hardware mixing so comes straight out the speakers with no pulseaudio involvement. needed a few registry hacks too (which I can't recall)

quite a few people report success with HDMI audio output, but my monitors are too old for this, so I haven't tried it

interesting, hope you write this up sometimes and that it makes the front page so I see it :) I'd be most interested in getting this to work with audio so I could have my DAW in linux indirectly, unfortunately virtualbox is not happy with realtime audio (if I go via pulseaudio it's bad, and assigning the usb audio card to it makes it crash)

I'm guessing you're using Intel graphics for the host system? (please write that article). I can help test to some extent as I have two VT-d capable systems.

I've tried this a few times, it normally works but never found a good solution for sharing my keyboard and mouse, how have you made that work?

I have one of those small keyboards with a touchpad for killing the VM (I mostly launch in snapshot mode so I don't need to shut it down :)

Another popular option is Synergy (https://github.com/symless/synergy) but I never used it.

synergy works out of the box, just need to remember that most games require the "lock to screen" mode (which I have bound to F12)

Hm, I did try Synergy before but I found the latency was an issue, I didn't really change the config though, is there something to be done to improve it?

It's the reason I stopped dual booting and went full Manjaro.

The major benefit of switching from a proprietary operating system to a free operating system is the communities ability to investigate a problem and freely document how to fix it. It could be described as a decentralized troubleshooting process as it has no single point of failure and is free for all to contribute to.

The freedom these operating systems give us is something I think should be emphasised more as people tend to focus on the technical challenge.

My personal computers are on Windows 7, using Microsoft OS since Dos 6.22. At work & my server I've been using Ubuntu for years.

I was just waiting to see how Windows 10 would evolve, because I don't really want to use Linux at home but it seems that's the way I will have to go.

Just wait a bit more and things will sort out.

I am on MS OSes since MS-DOS 3.3. So far only skipped MS-DOS 4, Windows ME and Vista.

A week in to Xubuntu myself. It's such a pleasure being in control again.

Interestingly, my friends that started hating Windows 10 went back to 7.

Since Windows 7 I happen to only use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and even got back to doing mostly .NET projects.

Win 7 made me switch permanently. I got tired of the ever slower boot process despite not installing anything.

The year of Linux on the desktop was around 2010. The trouble is, I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the laptop.

Yeah, I was just joking really. (Although it's true, if by 'year of the linux desktop' you mean 'year it gets >10% marketshare')

My NAS runs CentOS and I have Arch/Ubuntu on my home pc's, but I still dual boot Windows on one because gaming.

The 'I wonder who else will switch to Debian 8 like me' just struck me as comical.

I would be extremely surprised if MS lost any meaningful amount of marketshare from Win10, especially to linux distros.

I have a cheap chromebook with Crouton and I'm very happy for the price. Cheap, light and I get about 10 hours of battery life.

> The trouble is, I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the laptop.

Do Chromebooks count?

Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude here. Windows runs in Virtualbox. It just works.

How is the default battery life? I had to use pretty aggressive tlp settings to get within 50% of what windows gets on an XPS out of the box.