RE: Linux vs Blue Screen of Death

["Bibbs, Christopher" <Christopher_Bibbs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In a word: DLL's.  They are the cause of more suffering than anything else.
In fact, the last copy of the MSDN newsletter I had referred to DLL Hell.
If you have Win95 or Win98 check to see how many copies of MFC42.DLL you
have.  If it's less than 3 I'd be amazed.  The stupid thing, of course, is
that you should only have 1.  It's a Microsoft DLL and the published
features tend to stay in place as things roll forward.  The problem is,
Microsoft exposes, but not publish, interfaces that will later go away.
When developers use those, they need to guarantee a certain version.  How do
they do it?  Well, they install their version of course.  Then you're
happily running your app when another program tries to load MFC42, but the
OS says its already loaded so just use the copy in memory. :)  I'm sure you
can guess what can happen next.

A quick check of my system shows 5 copies of said DLL with 3 different
version numbers.  Thank goodness the OS now keeps a protected copy for
itself.  Hopefully that'll cut down on these errors.  Hope this makes a bit
of sense (the explanation, not DLL Hell)

Christopher

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Mann [mailto:dbm@mainlylinux.dhs.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 12:31 PM
To: members@kalamazoolinux.org
Subject: Linux vs Blue Screen of Death


Hello all,

  Let me ask a couple of questions to the list.  Why does Windows NT blue
screen so often, and Linux does not?  Both are protected mode operating
systems, so what gives?  Does anyone have any real semi-concrete ideas
here?  I would expect an app to crash, but not the entire OS.

OK, now that we have admitted that NT does indeed blue screen heavily
(usually while using MS Office, go figure)  What did MS do to 2000 that
prevents it?

If this were happening to me while using Linux I would think of hardware
failure.

What can I do to diagnose those nasty bsod's?

On a side note, does anybody know why Netscape6 in windows 2000 takes up
less memory  than under Xwindows?  this is very frustrating to  me.  Is it
in the architechture of the Xserver?  Is it because windows uses a
more proprietary .dll and linux uses multiple libs that vary from
distro to distro, making it nescesary to add these components at
compile time?  Does anybody think that one reason that windows is less 
stable is because the 'gui' is running right there with the kernel (vs
Xwindows, which is a normal process that can be
terminated without bringing down the system)?

Please shed some light,

DBM