[charon]

Hi, I found some interesting information. Microsoft has published recently a patent for abstracting operating environnement from operating system.
Among inventors, Galen Hunt the project leader of Singularity and Eric Rudder the project leader of midori....
With this technology, Microsoft could run Windows (and Linux too) on Singularity to maintain the compatibility.

patent

This document describes too an isolation of kernel mode drivers:

Quote

The operating system 301 execution environment isolates the execution of drivers from the kernel to allow graceful device driver failure recovery.

I've already a lot of information about this subject.

WDF intro

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The driver model should enable the future development of driver isolation.The driver model should enable the development of driver isolation, so that drivers can run in a protected environment. When drivers run in such an environment, the operating system can recover from driver errors without crashing.
...
The interfaces in the kernel-mode driver framework are designed to make driver isolation possible in the future. Under driver isolation, a kernel-mode driver runs in a protected environment. If the driver crashes, the system cleans up any resources allocated by the driver and recovers without crashing or halting the system. Implementing driver isolation requires well-designed interfaces that can be readily marshaled and validated across the boundaries of the protected environment.

VEXEDD
Nooks
goal of Patchguard
Isolation driver by VM

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This approach would move the burden of guarding kernel code to the processor itself, instead of the current “cat and mouse” game in software that exists with PatchGuard, as PatchGuard executes at the same privilege isolation level as code that might try to subvert it. Note that, in a hypervisor based system, hardware drivers would ideally be unable to cause damage (in terms of things like memory corruption and the like) to the kernel itself, which might eventually allow the system to continue functioning even if a driver fails. Of course, if drivers rely on being able to rewrite the kernel, this goal is clearly unattainable, and PatchGuard helps to ensure that in the future, there won’t be a backwards compatibility nightmare caused by a plethora of third-party drivers that rely on being able to directly alter the behavior of the kernel.

isolation environment

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But moving forward, we want to use hypervisors to build an isolation environment between different compartments on a system. And we are doing a lot of work in that space.

blackhat
(page 26)

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Potential for greater intra-OS isolation (e.g. Ring 0 separation of drivers)

85% some crash on Windows are caused by drivers. In Vista Microsoft pushed many drivers in userland but it's not possible to do it for all drivers because performance problems. The long term solution and the most efficient is isolation by the language with Singularity/Midori. But Microsoft must manage the legacy drivers.The use of virtualization seems the most likely solution. WDF has been designed for this future...

[Hiroshi]

Interesting.. is this included in Windows 7?

[charon]

Hi, no it's not included in Windows 7. I think that ms will include in future (perhaps Windows 8)