You neglected to include
(e) many cases of drivers slapped together "because so-and-so says we
must", with no serious work put into it because it's not considered all that
important --- the company's focus is making hardware, not writing drivers,
after all.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by laziness or not caring. I
suspect (e) covers most lousy drivers.
Case in point: does *anyone* really believe that the general lousiness of
Diamond's video drivers on any platform (I've seen a lot of crappy drivers
from them, on every platform they "support" including all versions of
Windows) --- is intentional sabotage, as opposed to simply not caring?
With respect to Windows driver crashes: the Windows driver developers I've
spoken with all seem to think that the Windows 3.1 device driver model was
nonexistent, the 95/98 model is lousy, and the NT model is horrible. The
latter I fully believe, having seen the OS/2 1.x driver model it evolved
from :-) (This should, BTW, be taken as a warning by the folks designing
the UDI interfaces --- bad interfaces can make it nearly impossible to
develop good drivers.) It's not impossible that the best intentions of
device driver writers run afoul of a badly-designed device driver interface.
Heck, we've even seen that in Linux: anyone remember net-1 drivers?
-- brandon s. allbery [os/2][linux][solaris][japh] allbery@kf8nh.apk.net system administrator [WAY too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering KF8NH carnegie mellon university
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