Microsoft Announces Linux-Powered "Azure Sphere" IoT Platform

[indepe]

How to take over? Money...

*Shady, nefarious MS takeover guy*: Hey, Linus! I heard you got some cool tech there. How about I pay you and your core group of hackers 1 Billion dollars and you all relocate to Redmond? Sound good?

What would YOU do?

Nah, I’m fine where I am.

This is what I mean with taking over, in case it wasn’t obvious:
Embrace by offering a really nice implementation of a standard, and extend it with custom really nice features, until a lot of (important) customers use it. Then switch to offer something different with a nice migration path, and start dropping support for the original technology until there is complete mess that nobody wants to use anymore, and going back is too difficult. Or something like that. Has been done many times by many companies.

[ssokolow]

The "recoverable" crashes of the GPU drivers in windows are comparable to Mesa or Xorg crashes, they don't usually pull down the whole system. While there still are quite a bit of hard crashing that causes a bluescreen in Windows (which is equivalent as when the kernel component crashes in Linux).

Funny. I've never seen a Linux video driver crash take down only the application which caused it. Even my Windows XP retro-PC which really needs an OS reinstall for stability reasons is capable of turning some GPU hangs into recovery dialogs which only take down the game in question.

As for installing drivers without reboot... I mean really? Linux had that far before Windows. You can load and unload modules at will.

OK, explain how I can swap out the kernel and X11 portions of my drivers without killing open X11 applications like gVim and without relying on a non-default detact/reattach proxy like Xpra.

Even on systems which use the nVidia binary drivers, I've been swapping them out by shutting down /usr/bin/X and restarting it since I first switched to Linux back around 2003 or 2004. It's not that impressive when I seem to remember not having to restart any non-DirectX/OpenGL applications the last time I upgraded the video drivers on my Windows XP retro-PC and I know that Vista and beyond are capable of that.

For a desktop system, the fact that you're not technically restarting the kernel when you restart the X server is an irrelevant technical difference that'll just make you look annoying and unjustifiably smug if you try to use it to argue that Linux is comparable to Windows on that point. I shouldn't have to build a desktop exclusively of applications like Deluge and MPD with a strong client/server separation when it makes more sense to implement non-disruptive updates once in the system itself. (And, since there aren't a full set of such applications to meet my needs, I just wrote some init scripts which use package pinning to defer GPU driver updates until the system is booting so I don't run into OpenGL failures from version mismatches between libGL and the loaded kernel module.)

[starshipeleven]

Funny. I've never seen a Linux video driver crash take down only the application which caused it. Even my Windows XP retro-PC which really needs an OS reinstall for stability reasons is capable of turning some GPU hangs into recovery dialogs which only take down the game in question.

KDE compositor can do so, (i.e crashing OpenGL rendering and then disabling it without taking down everything) random example: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...ivers-384-90-/ and it did this to me some times with my Intel HD4000.

Some other stuff (intel driver bug causing crash on start in some applications) https://bugs.launchpad.net/mesa/+bug/1274315

OK, explain how I can swap out the kernel and X11 portions of my drivers without killing open X11 applications like gVim and without relying on a non-default detact/reattach proxy like Xpra.

Hmm... AFAIK the only compositor able to pull that off is Arcan (wayland compositor) https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/cras...d-compositing/
Minus the swapping of kernel.

For a desktop system, the fact that you're not technically restarting the kernel when you restart the X server is an irrelevant technical difference that'll just make you look annoying and unjustifiably smug

Ok I'm wrong on the graphics drivers, I was thinking more about other drivers for some reason.

[Sonadow]

Windows has always outclassed Linux on the desktop side.

Even to date, pulling a USB drive out from Linux without unmounting and ejecting it first on my system (Fedora, by the way) makes it unreadable. This never ever happens with Windows since the XP days.

And the amount of GPU driver lockups I had during the ATI days on Linux were downright infuriating when the whole machine needed to be restarted vs an application crash and instant recovery with a popup balloon saying that the GPU driver had recovered in Windows.

And just yesterday, I had an interesting issue with a USB drive in which for some reason, had no partitions (files were written direct to /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdc1). Tried to use fdisk to clean and recreate a basic partition tablet with a primary NTFS partition, and failed every single time. Took the same unit to a Windows PC, launched diskpart and one 'clean' and 'create partition' command later, I got exactly what I needed.

[ssokolow]

Windows has always outclassed Linux on the desktop side.

Even to date, pulling a USB drive out from Linux without unmounting and ejecting it first on my system (Fedora, by the way) makes it unreadable. This never ever happens with Windows since the XP days.

And the amount of GPU driver lockups I had during the ATI days on Linux were downright infuriating when the whole machine needed to be restarted vs an application crash and instant recovery with a popup balloon saying that the GPU driver had recovered in Windows.

And just yesterday, I had an interesting issue with a USB drive in which for some reason, had no partitions (files were written direct to /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdc1). Tried to use fdisk to clean and recreate a basic partition tablet with a primary NTFS partition, and failed every single time. Took the same unit to a Windows PC, launched diskpart and one 'clean' and 'create partition' command later, I got exactly what I needed.

Sorry to tear down someone whose points agree with the thrust of mine, but I have some counter-examples.

Back in my high school days when I was dual-booting Windows 98SE and MandrakeLinux because I hadn't yet bitten the bullet and accepted that pirating Windows XP was the future, I had an ATi Rage 128 installed and the newest ATi drivers would reliably blue screen the system once eMule got up and going. The Linux drivers for it were rock solid.

Likewise, with the USB drive with no partitions, I remember being in a similar situation to you and had no problem on Linux. I'm pretty sure I was using fdisk at the time, so I'd chock that up as "fdisk has always been user-hostile. Try another partitioning tool." (Worst case, you just dd if=/dev/zero over enough of the beginning of the disk to erase the filesystem metadata so your tools think it's empty and then search up the instructions for partitioning and formatting a brand new drive.)

[pal666]

Er... how, exactly do you do that?

dnf upgrade

[pal666]

You were able to swap out your X11 drivers without having to restart your running X applications back in the Windows Vista era?

x11 drivers do not drive anything, i am swapping real driver - mesa. still running apps are using old one, newly started apps are using new one

[jacob]

dnf upgrade

That's missing the point. You still need to restart your desktop completely to use the new driver.

[ssokolow]

x11 drivers do not drive anything, i am swapping real driver - mesa. still running apps are using old one, newly started apps are using new one

Ahh. Good for you then. I'm still on the nVidia GeForce GTX750 that I bought when my GT430 died and, if I upgrade the userland components, they'll refuse to provide GL acceleration and print a kernel-userland version mismatch error to stderr.

[RomuloP]

That's missing the point. You still need to restart your desktop completely to use the new driver.

I'm in no way saying it is as smooth as TDR, but you could change TTY, stop your DM, reload modules and start it again.