OSes
User interface tweaks are nice, but reliable drivers matter more
Microsoft has laid out plans for how it and its partners will deal with iffy drivers causing stability problems in the company's flagship operating system. Dubbed the Driver Quality Initiative (DQI), Microsoft has outlined four pillars to support the program.These are Architecture – hardening kernel-mode drivers and enabling third-party kernel-mode drivers to transition to user mode; Trust – raising the bar for trusted partners and drivers; Lifecycle – addressing outdated and low-quality drivers; and Quality Measures – going beyond simple crash counts to measure driver quality.
It's all very laudable, although, aside from references in the architecture pillar, Microsoft's WinHEC 2026 announcement said little about how Redmond ended up in a situation where drivers can run at a privilege level that allows a failure to leave the operating system hopelessly borked.
The infamous CrowdStrike incident of 2024, which crashed millions of Windows devices, ably demonstrated the dangers of drivers running around in the Windows kernel. Microsoft later blamed a 2009 undertaking with the European Commission for how that situation came to be, although it skipped over the whole not-creating-an-API-so-security-vendors-didn't-need-kernel-access part.
