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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison (blogsystem5.substack.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] JWBananas 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Moving down the stack, Unix systems have never been big on supporting arbitrary drivers: remember that Unix systems were typically coupled to specific machines and vendors. NT, on the other hand, intended to be an OS for “any” machine and was sold by a software company, so supporting drivers written by others was critical. As a result, NT came with the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), an abstraction to support network card drivers with ease. To this day, manufacturer-supplied drivers are just not a thing on Linux, which leads to interesting contraptions like the ndiswrapper, a very popular shim in the early 2000s to be able to reuse Windows drivers for WiFi cards on Linux.

[–] InverseParallax 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nvidia:

[–] JWBananas 2 points 2 months ago

It's a wonder that someone hasn't implemented a similar wrapper for WDDM. I suppose they'd rather force the vendors to play nicely.

[–] rottingleaf 1 points 2 months ago

Also ndisgen under FreeBSD. MS could have been nice for a difference and not broken compatibility.