DirectFlip is a feature which allows the DWM to: This was not particularly hard to implement, but after getting it to work I realized that we had a fundamental architectural incompatibility. To understand the issue, I must draw some timing diagrams and give a brief explanation of how display hardware works. Generally speaking, display hardware has to continually re-read the image from memory and send…
For the past several years, my wife and I have been volunteering at the shared breakfast for the homeless which is hosted by the First United Methodist Church in downtown Seattle (right next to the Pacific Science Center). We are not Methodist and we do not know much about the church (although they seem pretty chill), but we have found volunteering a very interesting experience….
While the focus of Windows 7 was to fix Windows Vista, the focus of Windows 8 was to make Windows scalable to the point where it could run on tablets and phones. This had always been one of the blind spots for Microsoft developers – we all had beefy development and test machines that were always plugged into the wall with fans to cool them….
Everybody hated Windows Vista and everybody loved Windows 7. They did not understand how one release could be so bad and next so awesome, and if we could do one awesome release, why not do that for every release? The secret is that we did not actually do much feature work in Window 7 – all feature development occurred in exactly 3 developer sprints (I…
The 5-year period between Windows XP and Windows Vista was a career highlight – partly due to what we accomplished, but also due to the great team that I got to work with. The LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) team consisted of around 10 people and was led by Anuj Gosalia, and was further broken down by two sub-teams – Steve Pronovost led the scheduler…
Before I describe my experience implementing GPU virtualization, I want to first describe the overall architecture. As the internal codename for Windows Vista was “Longhorn”, we referred to this architecture as LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model). Later it became officially known as WDDM (it even has its own Wikipedia page). As I said in the previous post, CPUs can switch between applications very quickly because…
After we shipped Windows XP in late 2001, it became apparent that we needed to redesign the operating system architecture that supported the GPU. Before I get into this, I need to explain how things worked at that time (and why they needed fixing). This will be a little more technical than my previous posts. GPUs are different than CPUs in many ways (especially the…
I’ll admit that I was a Republican until 2016. Perhaps this is expected given the above chart above and that I was raised Mormon. But I switched when Trump became the candidate and I just assumed that many others would do the same – I was obviously very wrong. Re-reading the gospels makes it clear that while Jesus was neither a Republican nor a Democrat…
I bought this book on a whim several months ago while browsing the Sub Pop store at the Seattle airport. I was a big Hole fan back in the day, although I knew nothing about the band (outside of Courtney Love, of course). Patty was Hole’s drummer. This book is both very compelling and very depressing, as she documents her drug addiction that few people…
Last night was the first presidential debate between Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. I listened to the debate and it was kind of crazy. Donald Trump’s MO has always been to name call and then overwhelm his opponent with a random stream on ridiculous statements and then constantly switching the topic so that the opponent does not know which statement to…
