alt Hacker NewsIf anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.
This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).
NT4 started with a kernel mode, user mode, security model and drivers had to be written and validated accordingly.
9x, me, and even compatibility parts of XP (up to some service patch IIRC? Might have been SP2) would still allow dos mode realtime BS for any driver that wanted.
I loath all the dang software modems too cheep to ship a decent device in a single unit and instead slice off the user's already constrained resources.