Would a bad driver update potentially have had similar consequences? (real question)
If so, this feels like a red herring.
If so, this feels like a red herring.
Which actually happened in one of the Windows 11 preview releases.
It might not be Widgets next time - but there’s enough stupid in Windows that it could be anything from SmartScreen to Defender to Copilot to Edge. It could also be just something widespread and stupid, like Intel or NVIDIA’s driver analytics imploding.
https://www.neowin.net/news/how-an-ad-from-microsoft-broke-t...
I also don't know if Microsoft's security software can rollback from bad definition updates.
Does that include "boot-start" drivers?
> A boot-start driver is a driver for a device that must be installed to start the Microsoft Windows operating system.
* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/i...
CS designated their software as one, and when it crashed so did the whole OS to the point that the rollback process doesn't seem to be able to kick-off.
I'm not sure... I don't actually know what driver it was that failed; although I suspect it was a video driver. Computer made some noises, blue screened, restarted, repeat N times, then came up, and after login said something about a bad update and may have told me which device, but I forgot. I was across the room for most of it.
I can't see why this wouldn't work. A should be in B's stack trace, outside of esoteric interactions.
The rollback didn't work for the Crowdstrike problem because despite being a ".sys" file, the file that was updated wasn't a driver.
This has been the case at least since the late 90s if I remember correctly.
Some unscrupulous drivers will detect that they are being run by WHQL and disable various features so they pass certification. Of course, they also run dog slow in the WHQL lab, but that’s okay, because WHQL is interested in whether the driver contains any bugs, not whether the driver has the fastest triangle fill rate in the industry.
The most common cheat I’ve seen is drivers which check for a secret “Enable Dubious Optimizations” switch in the registry or some other place external to the driver itself. They take the driver and put it in an installer which does not turn the switch on and submit it to WHQL. When WHQL runs the driver through all its tests, the driver is running in “safe but slow” mode and passes certification with flying colors.
The vendor then takes that driver (now with the WHQL stamp of approval) and puts it inside an installer that enables the secret “Enable Dubious Optimizations” switch. Now the driver sees the switch enabled and performs all sorts of dubious optimizations, none of which were tested by WHQL.