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Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

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Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#151

Post by latency-guy2 »

subharmonicon wrote: post #43
mikewarot wrote: post #32

Looking back on all both Daves said, there is an extraordinary amount of attention paid to getting things done and out the door, and almost no mention of planning ahead, and actual security strategy. Its all commercial pressure to get the sausage out of the meat grinder, and keep the failures down to an acceptable level. No wonder things never get better, and never take a turn in the right direction, industry wide. I…

Most execs at most companies really are driven by very short-term planning and thinking, as it benefits their career to do so. They just need enough good quarters/years to justify their promotion from VP to SVP or SVP to CEO. Nobody gets blamed and punished three years after they move on to a new role for the shortsighted choices they made in their previous role. Having said that, Cutler is not one of those execs, bu…

Short term planning can mean anything to an observer though. For some, that's the next cycle, others thats the next 10 years.

Microsoft employs a huge squadron of engineers, managers, and execs, all owning distinct products, tools, software, etc.

They can have multiple people planning short and long term things, and they do. I doubt Microsoft will cease to exist within the next 10 years.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#152

Post by justin66 »

ww520 wrote: post #118
macintux wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in the world was that unanticipated?

Because a blue screen is a nice spot to debug. It’s like an assert statement. You want to find out what’s the error code, where it happens, and why. Even a vague location can narrow down the problematic area.

Right, and you can look into all of that… after you restart the machine

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#154

Post by [deleted] »

hjk_bear wrote: post #144
mrweasel wrote: post #7

The interviewer, Dave Plummer, is also is also an amazingly interesting person in his own right. I particularly enjoyed his retro-coding videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm us…

Dave's Garage is a channel with genuinely interesting content and is very knowledgeable about all things Microsoft/Windows. However (I hate to be this guy) take everything he says about non Microsoft/Windows stuff with a huge grain of salt. Especially after this comment he made [1]: >" No, Windows is a closed-source operating system loved by millions. Linux is an open-source operating system which includes a binary b…

[deleted]

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#155

Post by [deleted] »

HankB99 wrote: post #146

I was hoping to get some insight into the roots of NT. At the time my understanding was that it resulted from the split between IBM and MSFT and that MSFT was already developing NT based on their derivative of OS/2. That was IIRC before Dave Cutler went to MSFT. Later on that (OS/2 -> NT) seems to have been scrubbed from history and NT is now derived from VMS. I'm curious where the truth lies. It was well documented…

[deleted]

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#156

Post by TMWNN »

muststopmyths wrote: post #82
petercooper wrote: post #54

The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me…

Packaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .

Many PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games.

Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#157

Post by astrange »

cpeterso wrote: post #123
eismcc wrote: post #78

I worked in the windows kernel team and my favorite story about DC is when he basically made x64 happen because he hated Itanium architecture so much. He worked with AMD and basically made it happen while cranking in his corner office.

I was an SDET on the Windows team in the 2000/XP era and heard that the internal code name for the x64 port was “Sundown” because Microsoft was hoping it would take down Sun in the server market. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that prize went to Linux on x86-64.

Microsoft also wanted to "destroy Sony" in gaming and so codenamed Xbox and DirectX after a WW2 battle that Japan lost and the US atomic bomb project.

Presumably the resulting bad karma is why the Xbox never sold well in Japan.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#158

Post by astrange »

philjohn wrote: post #130
bitwize wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's intriguing to me is that Itanic was the "fetch" that Intel tried to make happen not once, not twice, but three times: once as iAPX 432, once as i860, and once as Itanium. The whole idea of "pack multiple (often variable bit-length) instructions into a word and rely on compiler writers to determine optimal instruction packings" to make implementation simpler and therefore hopefully faster, but woe betide thee i…

Thinking about instruction packing and if this is something a JIT could have helped with, if we'd had state-of-the-art JIT's at the time.

Unfortunately it can't work well because memory latency is so high and variable.

It has been used in GPUs though.

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#159

Post by astrange »

Veserv wrote: post #128
helloooooooo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, those are just box ticking exercises. Same with SOC certifications. Security is not a state of being, it is a process.

In what world are formal proofs of correctness “box ticking exercises”? You are wrongly extrapolating that the lowest levels of certification, that were literally designed to allow people incapable of more than box ticking to be rated on a unified scale, somehow applies to the levels that were designed to evaluate actual security. That is like saying the Richter scale is useless because you can not even feel a 1.0 ea…

Adding the word "formal" to something doesn't mean it can do the impossible. It's not realistic to prove things correct, since it's both an impossible amount of work and you'll end up finding that your definition of "correct" was incorrect.

(CompCert, a "formally correct C compiler", has had bugs found in it.)

Re: Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

#160

Post by TMWNN »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #46

Hard to believe this guy is 81. He looks and sounds like he's in his late 60s.

Cutler was a total jock in high school and college. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930516&slug...> Showstopper talks about his continued focus on athletics while whipping the NT team to finish the job and get it out the door.
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