That way, they could have used allll the existing Windows drivers there are, by prompting the user to insert a legitimate Windows CD to pull them from (similar to how OpenTTD or Doom ask for the original asset files) they wouldn't need to take care of copyright as well...
¹ At the time of this writing, there are open PRs like this one: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/8422
And fortunately every upcoming alternative has them; Genode, LionsOS, Redox and so on.
"WDDM is a major overhaul that shifts responsibility of managing the GPU away from Win32k and gives better control over the GPU to the driver vendor. Dxgkrnl.sys, the DirectX graphics driver, talks to a miniport driver to provide varying levels of WDDM interfaces."
"Officially starting with Windows 8, every GPU driver for the system had to be a WDDM driver. But all that was really dropped was the miniport driver."
"For WDDM, the communication back to the miniport driver is more direct."
So does the miniport driver exist in modern Windows at all (and is an essential part of how WDDM works), or was it dropped?
modeless•3mo ago
DWM is also an unsung hero of the Windows graphics stack that isn't equalled elsewhere.
baq•3mo ago
Microsoft and GPU companies (nvidia, amd, intel mostly, but there obviously were many others) collectively spent literally billions (not a typo - think about the engineer-hours on these multi-million-LOC code bases) on getting the windows graphics driver model mostly right. The amount of tooling is staggering and the fact that a crash in the driver most of the time just causes the screen to blink for a second instead of a bsod is amazing.
Rohansi•3mo ago
Still seems very relevant.
kokada•3mo ago
I am not sure about security or how easy it is to hang the system though, I assume those are still true.
kaszanka•3mo ago
What GPU are you using and how did you configure this, if you don't mind me asking? On my end I just can't unload the driver for it if I let KDE start with the external GPU available.
kokada•3mo ago
kokada•3mo ago