On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:39:21AM -0500, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > They have *everything* to do. Look, I *said* this is OT, but since you > insist, the overwhelmingly *bad* design decision was to put the GUI into > ring 0, instead of the way Windows 3, and X on *Nix, and *everybody* else > did, resulting in a GUI error bringing down the *entire* system. The only part that runs in ring 0 is the video driver. The GUI itself runs in userspace. In Linux the graphics driver runs in userspace, but even that can freeze a machine because it requires direct hardware access. My Radeon HD 2400 PRO driver will cause an immediate lockup if I run X, then quit X, then start X again. So the ring-0 stuff is a bit of a red herring. -- rgds Stephen