The Glade 4.0

I just ran the Windows update. I happened to notice one of them was optional, so I checked and found it was a mobile ATI update. My laptop uses an ATI display. Installing that seemed like a good idea.

So I'm tooling around, browsing wikipedia, when suddenly my monitor display shrinks from a 16" laptop screen to the size of one of those dinky netbooks my sister-in-law has. There was no error message, nothing about the machine started acting up, nothing crashed. Everything's fine and dandy, it's just... tiny. I find this incredibly strange, but apparently my laptop seems to think it's perfectly normal. What the ****? It's not unlike when my brother and I were driving down the highway, and he spots this guy standing next to a broken-down car, with a guitar strapped to his back.

After completing the install and rebooting, everything is running normally, and my monitor is displaying across its full surface area. **** Windows.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's not Windows man, it's the ATI drivers. Did you check the control panel to see if overscan settings were being applied? That happened last time I updated my drivers.

Wait, you were doing other things while video card drivers were getting updated? Screens flicker and change res all the time when updating video drivers. It was fine after a reboot? Don't see the problem.

No, the guitar was slung in playing position, that was the weird part. Slung on his back, okay, he's just broke down, he's slung his guitar on his back, he's waiting for a ride. This guy was standing in front of his car (the bumper was completely detached and laying on the ground), with his guitar in front like he was serenading it.

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Yeah, I'm with this. Updating drivers is a process in itself, it won't work till they're done updating and you reboot.

Also, for guitar guy, maybe he was just sitting there playing until his ride got there?

Nah, still doesn't make sense. In that case, I would expect him to be sitting on the hood or the trunk, you know, taking a load off. I'm trying to remember, but I think he was shirtless, too.

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I think you misunderstand. It didn't change resolution on me. It shrunk. I had the same resolution, displayed on a viewing area the size of a paperback book. It wasn't an omfg my computer broke problem, it was **** up. Hence the comparison to guitar guy.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Sure, but you're still complaining about the screen doing weird things while you were installing new drivers. That's not abnormal.

That would be pointed, except for the fact Windows schedules a time to enact certain tasks during an update. Several such tasks are performed as part of a shut down process (presumably, those that would most interfere with the normal function of the machine). The fact that Windows did not schedule the driver install for the "restart your machine" phase of the update may not be abnormal, but it is kind of dumb.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I don't see the problem with the guitar guy. He was taking a break, probably just working on a new song, "the broken down car, I can't fix it with a six pack of lites and this old guitar, sitting on the side of the road waiting for the girlfriend to pick me up blues."

As far as the weird install, no clue.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

It is occurred to me, some of you may be misunderstanding the reason for the post. Wednesday was apparently a big security patch day, with some 17 updates. (My last update prior was the 12th, so it isn't like I don't regularly run the Windows update). I am not mystified as to which update was the culprit. What mystifies me is that 34 years after the invention of the personal computer, and ten years after the rapid proliferation internet access began, we still have not come up with a more elegant method of implementing these driver updates.

Funky **** happens when you update display drivers, and it requires a system reboot. Yeah, I know. Why are we okay with this? Why is this acceptable?

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Why shouldn't we be? Thanks to the smart people at Microsoft we have to reboot for far less stuff than we did 10-15 years ago.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

...

Because on real operating systems you can upgrade your display drivers without rebooting the machine?

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I'm trying to come up with an example of another real operating system and drawing a blank...

It does still require that you restart the X server though, doesn't it? I actually can't remember what happened the last time I updated my video driver.

I don't see any practical way to avoid that. If you're going to replace the thing that manages some resources, you're going to have to let go of them at some point. Theoretically you could avoid this, but the complexity necessary to accomplish it would be of dubious merit from a cost/benefit point-of-view.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stathol:

You just re-start the X Server. You don't have to reboot.

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We once held this view about airbags. The rapid pace of growth in the computer industry over the past fifteen to twenty years rather puts the lie to the notion that it's too complex to be worth the time, money, and effort. There are a lot of things that we take for granted now that are extraordinarily complex.

For example, our society worked just fine prior to the internet. It's an enormously complex entity that, quite frankly, was of dubious merit given the cost to implement it on a broad scale. Yet, now our society really can't function without it.

I'm not disputing that it would be very complicated to build an operating system that allows one to update a video driver without a total system reboot. It's already a monumental undertaking just to build a modern OS. However, I would remind you that we are talking about electrical signals traveling back and forth inside of a box. If you go and install a new air conditioner in your home, you don't have to completely disconnect your house from the grid.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I always have problems with ATI drivers. It's gotten to the point where I download the drivers, reboot in safe mode, uninstall the old and install the new. Whatever patching utility they use just flat-out blows.

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I just installed the latest iteration of Nvidia GeForce drivers on two different computers. One running an 8800GTX and one running a 470GTX. No reboot was required on either (Win 7 Ult). There was some minor screen flashing during the install, but otherwise no interruptions.

Also, the new nVidia drivers' installer upgrade is pretty sweet.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yup and I love the ability to do a "fresh install" in the custom installation.

Well, actually it's not complicated at all. Mechanically, Windows has all of the necessary parts to do it (kernel module loading and unloading), but the video driver winds up being a wonky case because the GUI depends on the graphics driver (understandably so) and you can't restart the GUI without completely rebooting the OS (not so understandable). On *nix, this is layered better -- you can restart just the GUI (the X windowing system) without restarting the whole OS.

I'm totally with you about it being stupid that you have to reboot Windows for driver updates. My comments about complexity were with regard to solving that problem, or the even more difficult problem of trying to make a video driver update completely seamless. That's...a horse of a different color.


Yeah, let's run with this. I was trying to come up with an analogy involving cars, but it just wasn't working out. So, it's perfectly reasonable that you should be able to replace the A/C unit without disconnecting the mains (the Windows scenario), but per the Linux scenario, if you want to replace your A/C unit, it's still inevitable that at some point you'll have to turn off the old A/C unit, causing an interruption to that resource.

Could we solve this? Sure. There are two general approaches off the top of my head:

1) Redundancy -- i.e. some kind of internal "clustering" of the video driver that would let you do a rolling upgrade, so to speak.

2) Replace each "piece" of the driver one at a time while the driver is still running. This *could* be done if you were willing to commit to having a very consistent internal API between driver versions, and you have a very modular (and granular) design. Each part would also have to be capable of blocking, and being blocked by other parts of the driver. In this case, you could put each piece into blocking mode, wait for its queue to empty, replace it, and then unblock it.

Probably 2) makes more sense than 1) for internal processes like video drivers. But even so, why isn't this done? Well, the fact of the matter is that it's an exercise in over-engineering. It's not really about Moore's Law or anything like that. It's more a matter that restarting X is such a minor issue that there will always be something more important for the driver programmer to do in terms of improving the driver experience.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Well you have to turn off the old A/C unit, and since you're actually removing it from the circuit and replacing it with the new A/C unit, you have to cut power to that branch. (Actually, you don't have to, but you have to be very careful not to touch bare wires if you don't.) Cutting power to that branch doesn't cut power to the other circuit branches, such as the refrigerator, the microwave, the bedrooms, etc.

Using that analogy, you take video off the circuit. Your display drops and you can't see anything. The processor is still cranking. The sound is still working, so you can listen to your mp3s while you update video. The computer is still on and running, it just has no video. Midgen's screen flashes suggests that Windows 7 and Nvidia works this way.

Essentially, what I'm driving at is that it's entirely possible at the physical layer. In fact, we do it all the time with other electrical networks. Any problem that exists is software-based.

Take this a step further. You can hot-swap a video card. It's a lot like plugging in a TV. There's also a voltage spike: Gibbs Phenomenon offers a mathematical explanation for what happens. That spike happens any time you throw a switch, so it's a well documented event. We have a variety of methods of dealing with them, depending on what we're looking at. A PC motherboard has numerous switches where there are very low voltage spikes, but the circuit elements are also very delicate. This is one of the most well researched areas in switches, just below very big voltage spikes hitting very robust and sturdy circuit elements. (We are more interested in making sure arc blasts don't blow up electrical power stations than we are in making sure you don't fry your computer, but only barely.)

Now, hot-swapping any element inside your computer probably isn't a good idea for the simple fact that everything is very small, and you might fat-finger something. However, I wonder if it wouldn't have applications in big network backbone equipment? (Or for that matter, if it isn't already in use.)

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yeah, everything in the network has to be hot-swappable. We can no longer afford to power down equipment to insert or remove linecards, or any other piece.

As to hot swapping devices in your PC, it's supported with SATA and SCSI drives, as well as USB, Firewire, and Bluetooth devices.

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