Comment by coldtea
1 day ago
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.
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.
Read sibling comments to get answers to all your (non)questions.
Strange how you didn't read them then, based on your rude and false response to my comment.
You don't have to counterbalance every useful sentence with a toxic message.
You do, when you're responding to "Do you even know how drivers work? (I'm guessing no, based on this comment)". I'm merely giving them back their toxic comment right back.
I'm not sure how I missed they did it first, but doing it more isn't really helping. Oh well, I shouldn't have said anything, it's not great but it's not worth fussing about.
Though there is a limit to how much you can effectively sandbox a driver for most devices. They do have a point even if they made it badly. I know you listed some methods but they don't generalize to arbitrary devices very well.
1 reply →