Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist

tomshardware.com

85 pointsjosephcsible34 comments

I mentioned this in the Scott Hanselmen trying to re-allow local-accounts for Windows thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498494

It just seems so beyond-belief that Microsoft keeps having such depraved anti-consumer behavior. Maybe perhaps this was just a not-ready-yet feature folks had enabled being moved around or shuffled. But it seems just as likely Microsoft intends to keep consumers using a decade and a half years old shitty NVMe-downcast-to-SCSI layer indefinitely, to upsell folks to fancier Windows versions or gaming systems. Microsoft intends to keep Windows consumer disk access slow and bad.

As a seasoned Linux veteran & believer, it's somewhat against my interest to share this view, to try to arouse the slumbering behemoth to action. Microsoft not getting the message and doing great misservice to their users is somewhat in my interest. The status quo of Linux being far better at everything is great: gaming is already much faster on Linux, & that should be no surprise, and disk io too. Just holding my tongue and letting Microsoft make a fool for themselves with absymal performance would be ideal. But I also believe in competition, and Linux is going to start slacking off if Microsoft can't be arsed to update a disk io subsystem that was a filthy pitiful hack when they slammed it into service a dozen years ago. We all need some pressure sometimes to get off our hinds, wake the frak up, and pay some attention.

And perhaps, maybe: even Windows users don't deserve this malpractice.

Honestly, who cares if it wasn't ready. It was shipped, available, and required active screwing around by hobbyists to make active. If something goes wrong, thats not on Microsoft - its not an advertised feature. Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes.

Its inane that they still rely on scsi downcast, however.

> Should have let the hobbyist crowd keep going and kept tabs on performance and crashes.

Or they believe that it has serious issues in a consumer SKU or consumer application.

There is no Linux gaming without Proton, being feed from Windows games, developed on Windows, by Windows developers that will put up with this issues, because they still see no value on targeting Linux natively, and couldn't care less.

Linux might finally take off on the desktop if the normies that get Windows laptops and gaming rigs at Media Market and similar chains, finally get to them with Linux pre-installed.

Otherwise there will be a few HN folks getting them from System 76 and Tuxedo, Dell online store, and that is about it.

The fucked up thing is Windows is the most stable Linux environment to build against. Linux overall relies far too much on the idea that the software is either actively maintained, or open source and can be recompiled for new systems.

I see an advantage of finally having the Year of Desktop Linux, given the current geopolitics.

However until we start seeing those systems being sold on regular stores, with normies distros, it will always be as has been all over these years.

The "everyone is going to migrate to Linux" meme keeps coming up since Windows XP Toy's R us UI, however here we are, Steam Hardware survey 2.20% after two decades, since XP.

Proton serves as a target for now. You cannot have a target that is Linux like you have with Windows, you would have to target different distributions where users are additionally fragmented.

Sadly, people getting notebooks in the first place become much rarer. I have seen gen alpha developers that want to start with tablet and smartphone. They don't even know that they are prisoners, just like us and our economic system.

If AI was truly profitable Microsoft wouldn't need to cover their expenses at every other corner.

That's not how management works. The expenses will be reduced and profit increased by any means, all the time, forever, no matter how much profitable a company already is.

It is all about the curve, it has to always go up otherwise layoffs will happen, regardless of how big the CEO bonus happens to be.

> The native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys) replaces the legacy storage path that has routed NVMe commands through a SCSI translation layer since before NVMe SSDs existed.

What? What are Microsoft doing for a decade after NVMe available to consumer grade motherboard?

Seriously, that was my thought too. Even if we were to stretch credibility and suggest that general consumers don't care about this sort of thing, they just released this for Windows Server in the past year?

Windows really is a toy of an OS. It continues to blow my mind that people want to use it as a server OS.

Because it offers VMS niceties that UNIX clones still doesn't do, and stuff like AD, SMB, without manually going through configuration files stored somewhere, that differ across UNIX flavours.

Although I do conceed UNIX has won the server room and Windows Servers are mostly about AD, SMB, IIS, Sharepoint, Dynamics, SQL Server.

Naturally some of those can be outsourced into Azure services that Microsoft will gladly provide.

Which VMS niceties does it offer?

Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI.

Not being an OS from C to C as the main programming model.

And then on top, multiple levels of sandboxing, including virtualization of drivers and kernel modules.

Ah and RDP is much nicer than X Windows or VNC.

Other than possibly proper ABI, and yes a tiny handful of file operations that could theoretically block not available through io_uring, like ioctl and splice, Linux has the rest.

In security? Not really, unless you are doing immutable deployments with rootless containers, no shell access, which at the end of the day isn't UNIX any longer.

And which Linux exactly? Plus unless you're doing C or C++, most likely aren't using those APIs.

Anyway, the differences of bare metal servers don't matter in the days of cloud where the actual nature of the kernel running alongside a type 1 hypervisor hardly matters to userspace.

And to run windows only apps like some embedded toolchains. Although that gives a motivation for us to move on to gcc because windows is annoying to be used on CI/CD and gcc is good enough compared to that other toolchain

Your fanboi attitude is very welcomed on /.

And billions spent and earned clearly shows where the moniker 'toy' doesn't apply.

BTW year of Linux Desktop when?

there is so much to get angry about in the world at the moment.. I'm surprised that this one even registered with me.

They all feel like they're parts of a single expansive pattern.

I am guessing that like ntfs it's a huge legacy spaghetty codebase that nobody understands and thus doesn't want to touch

I hope so. I prefer my evil to be ineffective.

  What are Microsoft doing for a decade after NVMe available to consumer grade motherboard?

They were adding Copilot to everything, and implementing advertising tiles, and making sure it won't work without the appropriate TPM DRM, and forcing sign-in with a MS account to install it, and so on.

But they weren't ignoring NVMe entirely, they've got Rohan the intern working on it, and as soon as someone replies to his StackExchange questions he can start coding up the driver.

I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows. That makes perfect sense. I don't want to accidentally fuck all my data either. What sends me into an unmitigated schizo frenzy is the part where they double down over and over like it's a game of competitive CTF.

Microsoft did the same thing with notepad.exe. At some point it apparently got so intense that they added code to make it possible to prevent association of certain executables with certain extensions (i.e., if you got cheeky and copied the old version over and tried to use it). I know Microsoft deals in a lot of unusual business, but I'd bet my life there is no rationale for deeply restricting the use case here, other than to be an antagonizing prick to the other team/tribe who simply seeks to use their computer freely.

> I don't mind Microsoft attempting to fuse off experimental features in builds of windows.

The article says its enabled in Windows Server so the driver must be reliable.

It sounds more like they want to get people to pay for Windows Server to get high NVMe performance.

They may not be confident in its reliability over the fall gamut of cheap consumer drives.

Supposedly it requires additional workarounds to run in safe mode, and doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller (whether that's in use or not).

I also wonder whether this feature will be locked to server and the little-known "pro for workstations" variants.

> doesn't work if the NVMe drive is attached to a RAID controller

well that makes perfect sense, if its a consumer or prosumer grade raid controller, to be honest.

Much like oracle MS doesn’t have customers just victims that for whatever reason can’t escape

holy fuck, imagine segregating your customers' block layer

“NVME?? What’s NVME got to do with anything?

It’s the Task Bar!

For goodness sake can’t you see Windows users have lost faith because they can’t move the task bar!”

(Heard in meetings all over Microsoft campus recently).

and then they all break out into song and dance.

If you reaaaly dont liiike it, dun dudun dun!

Lock the taskbar. lock the taskbar! (ref: z0r . de / 2090)

Man, I love 20+ year old memes. The early Internet was a better place.

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