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Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

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Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#81

Post by viraptor »

cpgxiii wrote: post #44

The title is a gross exaggeration of the policy change MS is making. Come 2021, what will go away is the ability to sign drivers for Windows 7 and 8 without passing WHQL/HLK compliance tests. That's it. You can still update compliant drivers, and you can still ship unsigned drivers if your users are willing to disable signing (not great, but there are plenty of shitty vendors who do this already). Are there some numb…

> But it does sound like they have spent the last year complaining about the policy change rather than working to meet WHQL/HLK compliance

They seem to be a company doing many custom development and will have hundreds (thousands?) of separate projects. It seems reasonable they wouldn't try to pass HLK for everything just in case it needs work in the future.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#82

Post by cpgxiii »

TillE wrote: post #75
cpgxiii wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will absolutely denigrate vendors who lag behind on driver quality and support, particularly vendors who sell expensive equipment tied to ancient and shitty drivers who can't be bothered to update them support new Windows versions. Outside of a small set of drivers that WHQL/HLK testing may not work for, an unsigned driver means (1) the vendor doesn't care (i.e. "sold you expensive equipment and have you by the bal…

> almost everyone A 95% solution which completely fails to account for the remaining 5% is an enormous problem. As the article explains, HLK testing isn't really designed for non-hardware drivers and the solutions are strange at best. You're not actually improving quality in this case, you're just making us do convoluted busywork.

> As the article explains, HLK testing isn't really designed for non-hardware drivers and the solutions are strange at best. You're not actually improving quality in this case, you're just making us do convoluted busywork.

There's a lot common to driver development that's separate from purely interacting with hardware (memory management, filesystem interaction, security, etc), some of which the HLK covers. Plenty of non-hardware drivers are capable of bringing down the system or breaking things if they do something bad in kernel mode.

To be clear, the article is complaining about their specific case in which they claim to have a driver that explicitly violates nominal filesystem invariants and "cannot" pass HLK testing, not that HLK compliance is inherently a bad fit. Whether or not a different set of tests or a negotiated "Contingency" test filter are possible is a different question.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#83

Post by izacus »

matoro wrote: post #58
tsimionescu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more people releasing drivers for Linux 2.6 or 3.9 (the versions released ~when Win 7 and Win 8 launched respectively)? Or for OpenBSD 4.4? I think the state of support for Linux and open source in general is much, much worse than for commercial software. No one is maintaining >10 year old software. Especially not for free. Do note that this is not a story about not being able to run Win 7 anymore - it's si…

Yes? RHEL 6 uses kernel 2.6 and RHEL 7 uses kernel 3.10. Both are actively maintained and supported.

RHEL certanly isn't something that's maintained for free for everyone though. You pay a rather hefty fee for this kind of support.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#84

Post by dcuthbertson »

the_only_law wrote: post #65
cpgxiii wrote: post #44

The title is a gross exaggeration of the policy change MS is making. Come 2021, what will go away is the ability to sign drivers for Windows 7 and 8 without passing WHQL/HLK compliance tests. That's it. You can still update compliant drivers, and you can still ship unsigned drivers if your users are willing to disable signing (not great, but there are plenty of shitty vendors who do this already). Are there some numb…

What does WHQL/HLK involve and how does it work for independent developers and software-only drivers. I know that is generally not demographic of people writing windows drivers, but I'm curious as I have a half written driver that I plan to eventually finish, but the whole design is a bit odd.

I've run the HCK test suite (haven't tried the HLK, yet, bu from what I recall reading, the setup is similar). Basically, you need 2 servers, one to run HLK Studio and the Controller, and the other to run the HLK Client where the driver will be tested. Under HCK, the servers have a network connection.

You use the Studio/Controller UI to select and configure the tests and to find and select the driver on the remote server to be tested. Selecting tests is a bit odd on a software-only driver, but through trial-and-error and a lot of reading, I was able to find an appropriate set (it's a file system minifilter).

Once you start the tests, go find something else to do - the tests ran for about 12 hours in my case.

When you come back, you have to very carefully use the UI to collect the driver and the test results into a package file. You separately sign the package file with a cert that has been previously submitted to Msft (so they know who signed the package), then use the UI to upload the package to a Msft URL.

There's a website where you can view the signing process - it goes through several stages. In my case it took anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to get through all the stages. At the end, if all goes well, you'll be able to download a zip file that contains your driver signed by Msft. Once you have your driver, put it in an installer (we used WiX [0]) along with any other components (like a nice userspace tool for configuration, or to run as a service and load the driver to do useful things)

For a software only driver, it's a lot of busy work. I really don't think the HCK exercised my driver at all. Nevertheless, either me or the release engineer at work got through the process several times.

[0]: https://wixtoolset.org/

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#85

Post by dcuthbertson »

driverdan wrote: post #55

Yet another reason why centralized code signing is anti-user and a net negative. You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer.

Well, Msft attempts to use HCK/HLK to help ensure that the drivers out there are more stable. Once upon a time, there was no signing and some drivers caused the very unfriendly BSOD and Msft got the blame. There are a lot fewer of those today than there were before Msft insisted upon testing/signing things.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#86

Post by wvenable »

fortran77 wrote: post #78

Apple stopped supporting Mountain Lion, released when windows 8 was released, in 2015.

I assume that doesn't prevent you from using it and installing software and drivers? Just because something stops being supported doesn't mean it should stop working as it did before.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#87

Post by qayxc »

pulse7 wrote: post #36
fooqux wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you buy a product... Ah, but you don't buy this, you license it. That's where they get you. I agree it's very anti-consumer, but it's going to get worse. > Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires. Did I mention it will get worse? Maybe not with the silly welding tires example, but we're basically there. J…

You buy a copy of Windows binary code. In Germany you can even resell your copy of Windows binary code - for example when selling your old computer to somebody else.

> You buy a copy of Windows binary code.

No you don't. You buy a limited license to use and replicate the binary for personal use.

You don't "buy" anything but the physical medium the binary code shipped on. Transferring ownership of a medium containing the binary code to a third party (bought or otherwise) ends your license to use the binary, no matter if you retain a physical copy.

You also don't have the right to use the binary in ways not covered by the license (e.g. reverse engineering outside of the given right to ensure compatibility). This may include executing a copy on more than one machine or by a third party.

Finally, there's also a difference between violating licensing terms and such violations being persecuted criminally.

An individual might get away with it, but as soon as either commercial activity is so much as suspected or a company does it, there will be legal consequences in Germany, too.

Source: first hand experience with licensing audits in several companies involving multiple software vendors (not just Microsoft)

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#88

Post by bgorman »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19
bgorman wrote: post #16

Can anyone explain to my why people are creating new embedded systems with Windows? It seems to me that the developer experience, ecosystem and driver support is worse in literally every single way, not to mention you don't have control over the OS code.

Working video support (without hardware acceleration) out of the box without any external drivers for all current and future graphics cards because they actually implement the “core” vga spec (plus all the official and unofficial revisions to get higher resolutions working). We have to ship updates to our bootable Linux and BSD applications every six months just so customers don’t get stuck in text mode, or worse yet…

How does this differ from the "VESA" linux driver?

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#89

Post by ryukafalz »

app4soft wrote: post #67
ryukafalz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most cases you may execute such programs & games under Linux via WINE (+ Mono, PlayOnLinux, Winetricks; if needed). I do this for most games I want to play (and many are available natively on Linux these days!) but there are a few games with intrusive DRM that stop you from playing them on Linux. I have an older laptop lying around running Windows that I use for those if they’re not too demanding. Otherwise I’ll…

> few games with intrusive DRM that stop you from playing them on Linux. Is it from Steam? (FTR, There is already Steam for Linux too) BTW, report any issues with apps & games not working under WINE to WineHQ devs.[0] [0] https://wiki.winehq.org/Bugs

No, usually MMOs with things like GameGuard. Steam stuff generally works fine.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#90

Post by AniseAbyss »

fartcannon wrote: post #15

It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.

Microsoft has always been honest about when win7 would go EoL so everyone knew what they signed on for. They have a whole roadmap.
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