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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
34 comments
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.
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.
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.
Its inane that they still rely on scsi downcast, however.
> 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?
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 also wonder whether this feature will be locked to server and the little-known "pro for workstations" variants.
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).