[Paridel]

Other than the system Bus, Memory, Processor, and maybe some storage you should not *need* anything else to keep a system running.

OK, so you need the memory, processor, and system bus to keep the system running? The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is attached directly to the primary system bus (unlike older PCI cards which where on the PCI bus, separated by a bus bridge between the primary system bus). The AGP controller also has a direct line into the memory controller. (I'm not quite sure of the workings of PCI-express so I won't going into that).

But at least with AGP clearly a layer of abstraction was removed with the switch from PCI to AGP cards. AGP based video cards can view the main memory and video memory as one dynamic pool.

What I'm trying to get at is that you are claiming that removing drivers from Kernel land could in some way prevent a system going down from a driver error. In that claim you are making one big assumption, and that is that the hardware is as encapsulated as you feel the software is / or should be. That may be true, but I don't think that is necessarily will be in a general case. Adding that abstraction may add complexity to the hardware design, and that will have to be paid for either in transistors or speed. There is always a trade-off.

Maybe there is a very good separation in hardware in between the AGP card and the system bus which will prevent a problem no matter what crap the AGP cards starts to spew... but I haven't heard of it. I will be perfectly honest, now days I mostly deal with DSP hardware, so it is perfectly possible that I just missed out on that. The important thing isn't whether there is or not, it is whether or not you instinctively make that assumption or verify.

But in any case that is what I meant by my comment about the CompSci vs CompEng or EE view. There are just as many engineering trade-offs taken in hardware as there are in software.

If the monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, Ethernet, .... go the system itself should not crash.

Sure, that's why I pointed out driver problems can be mitigated to a degree, certainly a bad mouse vs a bad video card hardware or driver are two very different.

MS needed to do with another layer is provide a solid API

I think this overlooks a lot of the vendor specific portions of the drivers, and assumes MS would have a lot more information on the video card than is realistic.

-paridel

[N3WBI3]

I think this overlooks a lot of the vendor specific portions of the drivers, and assumes MS would have a lot more information on the video card than is realistic.

No, not if MS says to the vendors this is our API, you will use it or yyour sttuff will not be compatable with our system (Obvilusly this is something that has to be done when a new system is released NT was the perfect chance). Let the card manufactures make good use of the 256M they are putting on the card.