When was Microsoft Windows great? Was it ever great? That will depend on your experience and age.
The oldest version of Windows I tried was version 3.11. It wasn’t great. Windows 7 was decent. I suspect most would agree Windows Vista and Windows 8 weren’t.
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The operating system is a huge program. It consists of many smaller programs. The graphical interface you see when you use it is just a shell or desktop environment. The main program that interacts with hardware and controls all the other processes including the graphical interface, is called the kernel.
Why do I have such a low opinion of Windows? I’d probably need a couple of articles to express my opinion on just that topic. For now, let’s focus on one key problem: Microsoft’s approach to how applications made by other companies interact with the Windows kernel.
Microsoft Windows Achilles’ heel
If you use Microsoft (MSFT) Windows long enough, you’ll eventually witness its infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Why does the BSOD happen? It happens when the kernel enters a state where it can’t recover from an error.
Applications can run in two modes, user mode or kernel mode. The application running in kernel mode can do pretty much anything, and if the developer hasn’t been very careful, it can break stuff easily.
For example, if you have a sound card with a Realtek chip, you need drivers for it. As the kernel controls the hardware, this driver should ideally be part of the kernel. That is the default approach on Linux. Windows does it better, right?
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I’ll simplify things a bit here, saying that Windows drivers are applications that run in the kernel mode. Unlike Linux drivers, which are not applications but code that has been vetted by Linux developers to be merged into the kernel, Windows drivers are applications that sometimes misuse kernel-mode “powers” and behave like they’re in the Wild West.
I can’t remember how many times I had to remove Realtek sound drivers from someone’s machine while I was still working in IT. They are my favorite cause of BSOD.
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Talking about BSODs, do you remember the CrowdStrike incident? In July 2024, CrowdStrike released an update that caused hundreds of millions of computers running Windows to be stuck on a BSOD.
Needless to say, the CrowdStrike application that caused the problem was running in kernel mode (It has a “kernel driver” to be technical).
Microsoft’s plan to make Windows better
David Weston, vice president of Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft, wrote after the incident: “Kernel drivers are often utilized by security vendors for potential performance benefits.”
It seems that the incident made Microsoft think about whether the performance benefits are worth it.
Weston announced on Microsoft’s blog on June 26th that the company will deliver a private preview of the Windows endpoint security platform to a set of Microsoft Virus Initiative partners in July.
“The new Windows capabilities will allow them to start building their solutions to run outside the Windows kernel. This means security products like anti-virus and endpoint protection solutions can run in user mode just as apps do,” wrote Weston.
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It will be interesting to see if Microsoft mandates in the future that all cybersecurity vendors use this new userspace system. If they do, it might cause some backlash, as Microsoft would be the only one left with a kernel-mode performance advantage for its cybersecurity software.
The company is also simplifying the “unexpected restart experience” (a kind name for a BSOD). They provided the picture, and it looks like that BSOD will become a black screen of death.
The company will also introduce Quick Machine Recovery (QMR), a recovery mechanism for machines that cannot restart successfully. In a widespread outage, Microsoft can use QMR to deploy fixes to affected devices via the Windows Recovery Environment. It should be generally available later this summer, together with the new BSOD experience.
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