I think they were talking about the various driver frameworks in Windows (WDM, KMDF, UMDF, NDIS and the various miniport drivers) having stable/well-defined interfaces and support libraries.

But also yes some drivers don't run in kernel space! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/wd...

I believe the main problem is that Windows goes to reasonably extremely lengths (it's not perfect, but it's fairly good) to not break the driver interface, so if someone makes a driver for something, then semi-abandons it, the driver will continue to work for many years.

This is often clear in graphics cards, the main problem is old cards don't get support for newer versions of DirectX, but otherwise continue to work.

Linux explictly doesn't support this -- that means when some hardware manufacturer makes a closed source driver, it's very hard to update the kernel. Unfortunately it seems many bits of important phone hardware (like stuff Qualcomm makes) only have closed source drivers.

Some kinds of drivers (e.g. graphics) run at least partially in userspace.

Yeah, but it’s not the norm.

Don’t get me wrong. Windows did a lot of work on driver stability. But I think cletus is too narrowly focused, and misunderstanding the context around Android and Fuschia.

Fuschia has been described as a replacement for both ChromeOS and Android, with a goal of solving a range of problems (not just driver compatibility) and unifying the target development platform (beyond the somewhat-limited Android-for-ChromeOS options that exist today).

It does not seem to me that it’s primarily about fixing Android driver compat, which could probably be done in simpler ways (and, as others have noted, Treble sort of kind of exists to mitigate).

(I also was amused that Cletus claimed that Windows drivers run in userspace—generally not true—while claiming that there are no real-world microkernel OSes.)