[German]Microsoft has announced in a new technet document to revise the rules for driver testing. The Windows graphics team has developed three new rules. Two rules deal with crashes and hangs in various applications on the devices caused by the graphics driver. One rule deals with driver rollbacks.
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A brief review: Driver evaluation should get better
As early as mid-May 2020, I had mentioned in the blog post Microsoft's new Windows driver evaluation policy that Microsoft wants to invest more in quality assurance of its Windows drivers submitted by vendors. At that time Microsoft had announced a tightening of the validation rules for manufacturers who deliver Windows drivers for their hardware via Windows Update.
Badly working drivers are a nuisance for Windows 10 users (and ultimately for Microsoft). It is often said: Only few devices or users are affected when there are problems with a driver – possibly after a function update. But this is of little use to those affected. In this Techcommunity article, Microsoft announced its ideas about the new measures that will apply to Windows drivers from hardware manufacturers from July 15, 2020.
In order to ensure the stability of the drivers and to be able to monitor them better, Microsoft will map the telemetry data in classes (called cohorts) using the hardware IDs and revisions, the version of Windows 10 used, and some other parameters. The goal is to detect critical device and Windows combinations.
New rules for graphics driver testing
Last week Microsoft then announced new and stricter rules for testing graphics drivers. This is listed in the Microsoft article Three new measures for Graphics driver evaluations. The Windows graphics team has developed three new measures for graphics driver evaluations. Two deal with crashes and hang in various applications on the devices that receive the new video driver. One rule deals with driver rollbacks. Here are the three rules that apply in each case.
- The first rule Number of user mode crashes in Microsoft Edge Chromium normalized by usage <= Baseline goal (and the ecosystem variant) looks at how often Microsoft Edge Chromium crashes due to the graphics driver.
- The second rule Number of user mode crashes in Communication and Collaboration Applications normalized by usage <= Baseline goal (and the Ecosystem version) evaluates the number of crashes in Display Drivers that occur in connection with the Communication and Collaboration Applications.
- The third rule Myriad of drivers that were rolled back or re-installed within 2 days of installation (and the ecosystem version) checks whether a driver is rolled back or replaced by another (non-WU initiated) driver installation within 2 days of installation. Such actions signal that the user has problems with a driver that are so severe that he has to use another driver.
These measures are currently being evaluated and will be used to adopt/reject decisions from 29 June 2020. Details can be found in the Microsoft articles linked here. Users with problems with the graphics driver should then contact the hardware manufacturer to find a solution.
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