Windows Update Is Getting Automatic Rollbacks For Faulty Drivers (pcworld.com)
- Reference: 0183210063
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/13/1938254/windows-update-is-getting-automatic-rollbacks-for-faulty-drivers
- Source link: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3139150/windows-update-is-getting-automatic-rollbacks-for-faulty-drivers.html
> The way faulty drivers work today is that the hardware partner is responsible for pushing an updated driver, or the end user is responsible for manually uninstalling the problematic driver. "This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period," says the blog post. With Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, Microsoft will be able to remotely trigger a rollback of the faulty driver to a previously "known-good" version of the driver via the Windows Update pipeline. Microsoft says that testing and verification of Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery will continue until August this year, aiming to deliver this feature to Windows PCs starting in September.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/hardware-dev-center/introducing-cloud-initiated-driver-recovery-for-windows-update/4519075
[2] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3139150/windows-update-is-getting-automatic-rollbacks-for-faulty-drivers.html
Blue Screens (Score:3)
Going back to the pre-XP days where drivers were less isolated and responsible for a lot Blue Screens. Drivers are a perennial place where Microsoft doesn't have a lot of control, but greatly effects the experience. I am honestly a little surprised that it took this long to try to come up with ways to gain more control than just signing.
As with any new managed experience, the value added versus how much people have to fight the management will be an open question.
Re: (Score:3)
When a provider manages something beyond the control of the customer is a managed experience. Like having an [1]MSP ("Managed" Service Provider) [wikipedia.org] maintaining your drivers would add is also "managed". Or how UX or [2]User Experience [wikipedia.org] is how someone interacts with a service.
But undoubtedly in this case Microsoft is running a service which managing drivers beyond the control of the user and is then a "managed driver experience". I didn't come up with those terms and if you want non-technical commentary on news that do
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_services
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really say "lol"?
Re: (Score:2)
WHQL signing was a huge leap forward from the shitty old days of driver installation Russian roulette.
For some reason it's not doing as good a job as it used to though. Maybe they should look into why that is instead of bolting on a band-aid?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's just my experience, but WHQL while undoubted better still wasn't the perfect panacea. I've had my share of rollbacks and plenty of drivers that never hit the service because of the extra effort. I think there's a little damned if you do and damned if you don't with anything hardware related being out of their control.
Re: (Score:2)
The second thing you do is bitch about crashes that wouldn't happen if you use drivers that pass even the mediocre quality standards represented by WHQL certification.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of time WHQL drivers only provided bare bones functionality of the hardware, or were significantly aged so that they would pass the WHQL certification. If you wanted the full functionality or performance of your hardware you still had to override the WHQL drivers with a full driver package from the manufacturer.
Re:Blue Screens (Score:4, Interesting)
Sound blaster Live / Audigy cards back in the day are one I remember. WHQL drivers basically just provided for basic stereo audio out. If you wanted to use any of the EAX or other advanced features of these cards you had to download the full driver pack from Creative.
Re: (Score:2)
I honestly thought that Microsoft already tried an automated driver rollback "feature" back in the early Windows Vista days.
I vaguely remember it breaking more issues than it resolved.
Re: (Score:2)
Reading more on it, this is for after they shipped a bad driver through Windows Update, but something new isn't ready yet:
> Today, when a driver published through Windows Update is identified after distribution to have quality issues, the remediation path relies on the hardware partner to submit an updated driver — or on end users to manually uninstall the problematic driver themselves. This creates a gap where devices may remain on a low-quality driver for an extended period.
next up reboot loops (Score:2)
This is Microsoft, we can expect.
1. Driver updates.
2. Driver bad, driver rolls back.
3. Driver needs update, go to step 1.
Re: (Score:3)
Or you'll end up with this situation:
Game XYZ won't run because it says that your video card drivers are out of date
You update them
The game crashes anyway with a different graphic driver error because it's bug ridden launch day garbage
The drivers roll back
And Game XYZ won't run again ...and suddenly you wish that you bought a Playstation 5 instead.
Re: (Score:3)
Let's be honest for any OS, we can expect to blame the OS maker for all the bad things happening with third party drivers.
Amazing (Score:2)
This happens so often, apparently, they need to engineer this whole complex subsystem and storage infrastructure to take care of this problem.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of just having quality control on drivers that get applied by Windows Update, they've decided to tack on a bunch of bullshit to remediate shitty drivers being auto-installed by Windows Update.
And then they wonder why everyone hates Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
> This happens so often, apparently, they need to engineer this whole complex subsystem and storage infrastructure to take care of this problem.
Well yes this happens very often. In fact the only kernel panics I've ever had on Linux were dodgy drivers. And the single most common problem on Macs are "GPU Panics" due to drivers.
It turns out when you have a piece of code that runs in a very low level written by god knows who, then you need a way to manage them not screwing up your system.
Fun fact: we wrote our own USB driver for a team project at university, one of the most frustrating things was waiting for the computer to reboot so we could have anot