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coldtealast Saturday at 7:13 PM3 repliesview on HN

First of all, drivers don't have to run in kernel space. Do you know that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment.

Second, we're not talking about the drivers per se, as those aren't what shows you ads, it's the configuration software and accompanying crapware. Did you get that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment.

Third, there are capability-based kernels, microkernels, drivers that are allowed into as restricted bytecode, IOMMU, and several other layers of security. Do you know that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment.


Replies

MatejKafkayesterday at 3:48 AM

To answer in a more constructive way:

No mainstream desktop OS tries very hard to sandbox drivers. Some drivers on both Windows and Linux (not very familiar with Mac) can be implemented as userspace drivers, as long as the performance hit is acceptable, but for many devices (e.g., graphics drivers), you need a kernel driver to get reasonable performance.

Therefore, if your OS supports loading 3rd party binary drivers (Windows do, Linux technically does as well, but tries to make them hard to use in practice), it cannot really refuse to load kernel drivers and only allow userspace ones without breaking a lot of machines.

Even if you have a userspace driver, the device may still get DMA access to RAM. IOMMU is a thing, but due to backwards compatibility, the driver chooses whether to enable IOMMU protection for the specific device on Windows.

If you're willing to write your own microkernel and bootstrap its driver ecosystem from scratch, your claims would be reasonable. With current desktop OS architecture, not really.

As for the accompanying software, there is a good explanation in another comment of all the valid use cases it has (printer dialogs, audio interface configuration,...). LG abusing that to show ads is primarily LG's problem.

MatejKafkalast Saturday at 7:44 PM

Read sibling comments to get answers to all your (non)questions.

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Dylan16807last Saturday at 7:37 PM

You don't have to counterbalance every useful sentence with a toxic message.

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