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Comment by mise_en_place | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Jonathan Blow, everything should go through userland/userspace. Even the graphics stack. I can’t tell you how many times my workstation would freeze due to a weird USB driver implementation.

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One advantage of Windows over Linux is the fact their graphics stack can easily be restarted while the system/apps/etc are running. The screen just dips to black for a second and you're back where you were. You can see this anytime you install a new graphics driver, but I have occasionally seen this happen spontaneously when a bug in a graphics driver gets caught and Windows reinitializes the driver. X11 definitely can't do that and I believe neither can Wayland. Not sure whether Windows does this for other things such as networking.

You can do this manually with Winkey+Ctrl+Shift+B

I once updated my graphics driver in the middle of a CS match. There was a second of black screen, a few seconds of lower frame rate, then everything was back to normal. I was amazed.

A lot of applications don’t handle the DEVICE_RESET event, though, so you’re likely to see them crash if the driver resets. Firefox used to have a bug where video playback stopped working after a driver reset, but that’s been fixed.

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, but I loved how on QNX I could restart the network driver process when it crashed.

(this was while developing a router, so the under development network driver process crashing was a frequent situation)

The way QNX handled hard faults was exceptional. Very important for certain environments like self-driving. We don’t have time for kernel panics when lives are on the line.

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