On Saturday, February 12, 2011 05:27 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > John R Pierce wrote: >> On 02/11/11 8:39 AM, 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 "GUI" is a fairly nebulous term. The graphics display driver >> is indeed at ring zero for performance (in fact in early versions of NT, >> it ran in ring 1 or 2, but the performance hit of the ring transitions >> to access IO ports on early graphics cards was overwhelming so in NT4 it >> was moved to ring0). However, the GDI, User (window manager), desktop, >> and about everything else are in ring3 user space. > > I'll assume that you've actually worked with the code; I haven't. However, > I also trust it about as far as I can through a sumo wrestler, since I > *know* as a fact that M$ frequently had apps make direct calls, *not* to > the system, but directly to the hardware because the code ran so slowly. > For example, the classic proof was when Apple went from Moto chips to > PowerPC, and it broke Word, where they were doing just that (and I've > heard that from friends who are Macaholics). > Oh stop digging deeper. You get app crashes and even lock ups too on UNIX/Linux. There is only one thing that we can all agree on. All Microsoft ware are high security risks and should be run inside a software fortress so to speak. Everything else is pretty much the same nowadays.