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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

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Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#21

Post by agwa »

olyjohn wrote: post #13
the-dude wrote: post #4

I have always thought about the shutdown crapfest as not being able to shutdown for like ... 25 reasons? I believe there is a KB entry somewhere listing a bunch of them. Almost impossible to troubleshoot ( network connections! )

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen.

Wrong. If a Linux process is blocked in an uninterruptible system call (typically for disk I/O), it cannot be killed, even with -9.

I have been unable to cleanly shut down Linux systems in the past due to processes getting stuck in this state.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#22

Post by semi-extrinsic »

sevensor wrote: post #19
olyjohn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen Desktop Linux user here -- while there are lots of advantages to Linux, this is not among them. At least, not without qualification. If something goes wrong with the graphics system and X hangs, SIGKILL bounces right off your window manager. But at least under Linux you can still ssh into the box and reboot it.

Why ssh? You have several virtual terminals available at Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2/etc. right?

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#23

Post by dingo_bat »

whowouldathunk wrote: post #6
jesseryoung wrote: post #3

Anybody who currently works on the Windows team know if things are still like this? I know I've read about improvements to the version control system for Windows teams and some other blogs about improvements in management practices but I'm wondering if even after 11 years if this has been fixed.

I work on the Windows team. Things are very different now. Source control especially: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large... It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though. And I think that's a good thing.

> It still takes a lot of political effort to change primary UI features though.

Hasn't prevented the travesty that the win10 UI is, though.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#24

Post by neilalexander »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #9
the-dude wrote: post #4

I have always thought about the shutdown crapfest as not being able to shutdown for like ... 25 reasons? I believe there is a KB entry somewhere listing a bunch of them. Almost impossible to troubleshoot ( network connections! )

I once had a Windows 7 machine refuse to shut down because it was "Playing Logoff Sound"!

Windows 2000 wouldn't even start the logoff or shutdown process until the logoff sound had completed playing. ;-)

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#25

Post by com2kid »

ajross wrote: post #18
theoutlander wrote: post #7

I can relate to this. It was a common theme across Microsoft. In one instance, the team I was part of was responsible for the initial integration of Bing and Facebook. We had about 24 dedicated people on the team (a few partner/principal group managers too!). Our team was considered agile because we released most features every 4 months (this was around 2009 I think)!!! Anyway, we had a hackathon at Facebook with Zuc…

This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too. I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power bu…

Power states are much more complex than this.

In reality, CPUs and SoCs have multiple levels of sleep, some of which are standardized for a platform. ACPI at least tries to specify what should happen on x86/x64 systems. ARM has some standards, and then each SoC implements a lot of their own, which, to be fair, are sometimes really cool.

For lots of the power saving modes, hardware drivers have to opt in. This is where a lot of problems happen, if a single driver doesn't work, a laptop won't go to sleep, and the battery dies. Or, on mobile, a single bug in some component (which may manifest itself only under certain situations, which is why a reset can fix some problems) can prevent a good sleep state from being entered.

Of course software can also present problems. For the longest time, if WebGL content was loaded in any tab in, I think FF (either that or Chrome, heh), then the GPU would stay on and the system would never go to sleep.

Fun stuff like that.

The behavior people really want is "turns on quickly, uses little battery." That is harder to do on PC due to legacy, but part of the problem is also different usage patterns from mobile. Users check their mobile frequently, if something is draining the battery, odds are it'll be noticed in a couple hours and the phone will get a charge (and some apps potentially force killed, based on how knowledgeable the user is.) Laptops have less periodic usage patterns, so a single problem program may not get noticed before the battery is completely dead.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#26

Post by zdkl »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #22
sevensor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen Desktop Linux user here -- while there are lots of advantages to Linux, this is not among them. At least, not without qualification. If something goes wrong with the graphics system and X hangs, SIGKILL bounces right off your window manager. But at least under Linux you can still ssh into the box and reboot it.

Why ssh? You have several virtual terminals available at Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2/etc. right?

I've had systems where those would not respond, but ssh did. I still don't understand why and it bothers me.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#27

Post by ajross »

com2kid wrote: post #25
ajross wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too. I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power bu…

Power states are much more complex than this. In reality, CPUs and SoCs have multiple levels of sleep, some of which are standardized for a platform. ACPI at least tries to specify what should happen on x86/x64 systems. ARM has some standards, and then each SoC implements a lot of their own, which, to be fair, are sometimes really cool. For lots of the power saving modes, hardware drivers have to opt in. This is wher…

Sure, but the interfaces are more or less as described, and that's what MS has to deal with. I mean, yeah, you could make it into even more of a messy description, but from the start menu's perspective the PMIC or EC interface to power management isn't particularly important.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#28

Post by sevensor »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #22
sevensor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen Desktop Linux user here -- while there are lots of advantages to Linux, this is not among them. At least, not without qualification. If something goes wrong with the graphics system and X hangs, SIGKILL bounces right off your window manager. But at least under Linux you can still ssh into the box and reboot it.

Why ssh? You have several virtual terminals available at Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2/etc. right?

That works sometimes, and when it works I can usually get X unstuck without a reboot. But sometimes X gets stuck in a way that makes me unable to switch to another virtual console. Then ssh becomes my only recourse, and the only way to kill X is to reboot. This has only happened to me on systems with nvidia graphics, although it doesn't seem to matter whether I'm using nouveau or proprietary drivers.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#29

Post by pavement »

ajross wrote: post #18
theoutlander wrote: post #7

I can relate to this. It was a common theme across Microsoft. In one instance, the team I was part of was responsible for the initial integration of Bing and Facebook. We had about 24 dedicated people on the team (a few partner/principal group managers too!). Our team was considered agile because we released most features every 4 months (this was around 2009 I think)!!! Anyway, we had a hackathon at Facebook with Zuc…

This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too. I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power bu…

If I don't like what a computer is doing, I will frequently just yank the plug, pull the battery, flip the circuit breaker, and fuck the rest.

All this buffering and fault tolerance is bullshit at the consumer level. If the disk's file table gets fucked up, then let it burn.

I'll format the disk and re-install your stupid operating system as I see fit, whenever I want, and keep my actual data safe and sound far away from someone else's stupid hung process, until it produces actual results that I can copy into place, whenever appropriate.

These are lessons I learned throughout the late 90's, in the face of countless blue screens, before migrating to linux.

   It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Indeed.
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