Windows 10: Driver quality in the Windows 10 ecosystem

Brink · Dec 19, 2018

Ensuring Windows 10 works great with all the devices and accessories our customers use is a top priority for our team. There are millions of configurations of hardware and driver combinations in the Windows ecosystem, allowing for great customer choice and unlocking opportunity for partners.

We work closely with this broad mix of partners to test new drivers, monitor health characteristics over time, and make Windows and our ecosystem more resilient architecturally. Our goal is to ensure that all the updates and drivers we deliver to non-Insider populations are validated and at production quality (including monthly optional releases) before pushing drivers broadly to all. Within such complexity, this still means that some combinations and configurations in the real world will require Microsoft or our partners to make adjustments. In this blog, part of our series on the Windows approach to quality, Tom Frankum from our Silicon, Graphics and Media team will provide more detail about the work we do to improve Windows driver quality.

The driver distribution chain

Drivers are tested extensively through a process that involves many companies. The first wave of testing is conducted by the independent hardware vendor (IHV). When an IHV—such as Intel, AMD or NVIDIA—creates a hardware component, it puts the hardware through significant testing that typically includes validating OS compatibility using the Windows Hardware Lab Kit (Windows HLK). The Windows HLK is a test framework designed to help IHVs automate the process of testing hardware devices for Windows, and meet the requirements for certifying their devices through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program. When customers download drivers from an IHV’s website, they are typically getting a driver that has met the IHV’s quality bar as well as basic Windows 10 operating system compatibility standards.

Next in the chain is the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), who tests the driver on each configured system they offer. An OEM—such as Dell, HP, Lenovo or Surface—matches the new driver to the various devices it ships and completes its own battery of tests. Feedback is shared with the IHV and may result in further driver updates. Validated drivers are then released via the OEM’s website or update tools, targeting the specific devices that the OEM believes have passed their quality bar.

Last in the driver distribution chain is Microsoft. IHVs and OEMs submit drivers to Microsoft, and we flight these drivers within our engineering system and, eventually, to Windows Insiders. If the driver performs well, we release it to Window Update (WU) for Windows customers to download automatically. If the driver doesn’t meet our standards, we reject the driver and ask the IHV or OEM to make updates that will improve how the driver works with Windows.

Microsoft processes more than 100 drivers a day submitted from IHVs and OEMs and many more are posted to IHV or OEM websites every day. In fact, there are several million active drivers in the Windows 10 ecosystem, which makes it very complex to evaluate the changes that occur over time. 2018 has been a particularly busy year because we made changes to Windows in response to new chipset-level security discoveries, and these changes necessitated an unprecedented number of updates to drivers and firmware. As a result, everyone in this distribution chain has been busy updating and testing in order to release secured drivers and firmware to the world.

Measuring and detecting driver quality

Improving driver quality is a constant focus for Microsoft and our partners. We don’t work on it in isolation, but as a combined effort across the ecosystem. Our goal is to deliver a great experience across all hardware for Windows customers every day. If there is an issue with a driver, our goal is to detect that quickly, stop customers from being impacted, then develop a fix as fast as possible for our joint customers. We use a combination of diagnostic data, feedback and other listening systems to detect when customers experience issues. We analyze a variety of metrics every day to assess and understand quality.

For example, one of the metrics we study is blue screens. We know this is an incredibly disruptive event; everything comes to a halt and the PC reboots after collecting important crash information.

Internally, we use a metric called “crash free,” which is defined as the percentage of machines in a population that experience no driver crashes during a given window of time. For the crashes we do see, we stack rank them based on the number of machines impacted, partner with IHVs to fix, and work with OEMs to automatically distribute updates to end users. As a result, the percentage of crash-free Windows 10 devices has increased from less than 97 percent to greater than 98 percent over the past two years.

Fractions of a percentage point matter when it comes to driver crashes, and we are striving to achieve an even higher crash-free rate for Windows 10 devices. To do this, we isolate drivers with higher than standard crash rates, work with our partners to adjust, re-validate, and continually measure the overall reliability. Driver by driver, we improve the overall reliability of Windows 10. The graph below shows one specific driver, where we followed this process and saw significant improvement from the crash rates in red (August 2016) to the performance in orange (September 2017).

Preventing conflicts

Driver conflicts arise when something is wrong with a specific driver, such as incompatibility, preventing Windows from properly utilizing associated hardware. During the rollout of a new Windows 10 feature update, we carefully monitor quality and feedback signals, including from driver quality to ensure the best possible update experience. If we detect that a device may have an issue, such as a driver incompatibility, we will not install the update until that issue is resolved by blocking that device from updating. This means that Microsoft will not offer an operating system update to devices with the combination of hardware and driver version that is at the root of the conflict. Instead, we wait until the issue has been fixed, re-tested and fully deployed, and then remove the block. We recently started sharing more of the details about these blocks on the Windows 10 update history page. An example of past issues with associated blocks can be seen here.

Improving quality through architecture

While we’ve seen improvements over time, we know there is more work to do. For example, we are working with our hardware partners to remove the complexity in Windows drivers and, in some cases, eliminate the need for third-party drivers altogether by creating a ”class driver” that works for all hardware in a category. Where class drivers are not an option, we are working with hardware partners and sharing quality data to reduce the number of driver variations that get released to customers. This collaborative approach brings more eyes to every driver prior to release and, in the end, yields fewer drivers in active circulation and a higher quality for each driver that is released.

We will continue to work closely with our partners across the industry to detect the issues customers experience, remedy those issues quickly and, ultimately, work to deliver the highest quality drivers to our customers possible. We will be sharing more soon in our Windows approach to quality blog series.

Across a broad range of devices and Windows 10 operating system versions.

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Source: Driver quality in the Windows ecosystem | Windows Experience Blog

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Monk.e83 · Dec 19, 2018

Unlocked Realtek HD Audio Drivers Windows 7 & 8 (With Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive)

Wait, but have you done the whole step-by-step guide described in the OP? DDL/DTS isn't supported natively by Windows 8/8.1 either, unless if you do the steps listed there.
Click to expand...

DTS supported natively by Windows 8/8.1 and it should work on windows 10 too just DDL require to unlock your driver .

Brink · Dec 19, 2018

Windows 10 Quality approach for a complex ecosystem

Today we are re-releasing the October 2018 Update after pausing to investigate a small but serious issue. This is the first time in Windows 10’s “Windows as a Service” history that we have taken such an action, and as such it has naturally led to questions about the work we do to test and validate Windows quality before we begin rolling it out broadly.

While our measurements of quality show improving trends on aggregate for each successive Windows 10 release, if a single customer experiences an issue with any of our updates, we take it seriously. Today, I will share an overview of how we work to continuously improve the quality of Windows and our Windows as a Service approach. As part of our commitment to being more transparent about our approach to quality, this blog will be the first in a series of more in-depth explanations of the work we do to deliver quality in our Windows releases.

Critical to any discussion of Windows quality is the sheer scale of the Windows ecosystem, where tens of thousands of hardware and software partners extend the value of Windows as they bring their innovation to hundreds of millions of customers. With Windows 10 alone we work to deliver quality to over 700 million monthly active Windows 10 devices, over 35 million application titles with greater than 175 million application versions, and 16 million unique hardware/driver combinations. In addition, the ecosystem delivers new drivers, firmware, application updates and/or non-security updates daily. Simply put, we have a very large and dynamic ecosystem that requires constant attention and care during every single update. That all this scale and complexity can “just work” is key to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Windows 10 marked a change in how we develop, deliver and update Windows: What we call “Windows as a Service.” We shifted the responsibility for base functional testing to our development teams in order to deliver higher quality code from the start. We also changed the focus of the teams that still report to me who are responsible for end-to-end validation, and added a fundamentally new capability to our approach to quality: the use of data and feedback to better understand and intensely focus on the experiences our customers were having with our products across the spectrum of real-world hardware and software combinations. This combination of testing, engagement programs, feedback, telemetry, real-life insight across complex environments and close partner engagement proved to be a powerful approach that enabled us to focus our feature innovation and monthly updates to deliver improved quality.

This data-driven listening approach has also allowed us to track our quality differently. Over the last three years one of our key indicators of product quality – customer service call and chat volumes – has steadily dropped even as the number of machines running Windows 10 increased. Another key indicator we track is the Net Promoter Scores (NPS), where we ask people to rate their Windows experience and track the ratio of “promoters” and “detractors.” Today, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update has the highest Net Promoter rating of any version of Windows 10. While we are encouraged by these improving quality trends at scale, we also understand that the trend doesn’t matter if you happen to be one of the people experiencing an issue. Our goal is to provide everyone with only the best experiences on Windows, and we take all feedback seriously. We are committed to learn from each occurrence, and to rigorously apply the lessons to improve both our products and the transparency around our process.

Continued product quality improvement trend: declining customer incident rate

Testing in Redmond

Our approach to product quality begins by listening to customers and representing their feedback in all aspects of our development process. First, we invest in customer and partner planning feedback to help us shape and frame our product specifications, including defining both required testing and success metrics. We employ a wide variety of automated testing processes as we develop features, allowing us to detect and correct issues quickly. We are regularly looking to address gaps in tests and often find them based upon our internal experiences and issues we note with our insiders. This suite of automated tests grows over time. The most fundamental of these tests must pass for features and code to “integrate up” into the main Windows build that will eventually ship to customers. In a future blog we’ll detail the extensive testing we do in-house, but it is safe to say that testing is a key part of delivering Windows.

Internally, Windows has what we call an aggressive “self-host” culture. “Self-host” means that employees working on Windows run the latest internal versions on their machines to ensure they are living with Windows. The “aggressive” part refers to the tenacious push to make sure local teams run their own builds and pursue any issues found. A strong self-host culture is a source of pride for those of us working on Windows.

Engaging our partners

Given the breadth of our shared ecosystem, testing goes well beyond our Redmond campus and extends around the world to dedicated Windows test labs as well as the facilities of our many partners. In this way we validate in-market and in-development releases at scale through arrangements with key testing partners including:

External testing labs with global, continuous coverage for application compatibility, hardware and peripherals

ISVs for a range of apps including Anti-Virus (AV)

OEMs partner with us to test and ensure quality across a vast array of systems, devices and drivers

Our approach to the driver ecosystem alone will make for an interesting blog post in this series. High-quality device drivers are key to a great experience, and we must engage closely with our hardware partners to deliver drivers at scale. The chart below shows the driver volume we can face month to month, with June peaking to almost 15,000 drivers delivered into the ecosystem!

Monthly driver volume via Windows Update

Engaging our customers

Delivering a quality product requires that we engage customers to provide feedback on our designs and plans. That is why we created the Windows Insider program at the beginning of Windows 10. Beyond the valuable insights Insiders share about the experience, the Windows Insider program further expands the volume and diversity of device usage that we cannot obtain in our own controlled environments. With Windows Insiders we gain fresh insights and feedback on user experience, compatibility, performance and more. Insider populations are balanced between pre-release and release preview versions that receive cumulative quality updates for drivers and many applications.

We also engage with commercial customers through many programs. The Windows Insider Program for Business allows organizations to access Insider Preview builds to validate apps and infrastructure ahead of the next public Windows release. The program helps IT professionals give us feedback on the features they use to deploy and manage Windows in an organization. The program has grown by 43 percent in the past six months, and we just introduced Olympia v2, which provides a complete Microsoft 365 deployment and management testing environment. We also have an invitation-only program for large enterprise customers, the Technology Adoption Preview (TAP) program, that lets customers provide early feedback on product updates via real-world product testing to help us identify issues during the development process.

During development and stabilization of an update, we use all our engagement programs to identify and fix issues that often only emerge in real-life settings. We also continue automated and manual testing, as do our partners across the ecosystem. We compare quality to previous flights and releases based on all the feedback tools available to us including Feedback Hub and social media. When we are confident in the user update experience, we begin to cautiously release a feature update to our customers.

Data-driven decisions making

One of the most critical advances we have made in our approach to quality is to continually improve the data-driven decisions we can make about the reliability of our product in-development and in-market. We begin by using detailed dashboards and metrics to evaluate the builds that we install daily on our own PCs, and only when we have clear evidence that measurable quality is at an acceptable level do we begin to start sharing flights for feedback with Windows Insiders. Our dashboards and metrics then scale to the volume of quality data and feedback we receive once a product is being flighted or is in-market. We obsess over these metrics as we strive to improve product quality, comparing current quality levels across a variety of metrics to historical trends and digging into any anomaly. Our data-driven approach is implemented with the highest standards of data privacy protection for our valued customers; you can learn more about that via our Privacy at Microsoft page.

Rollout principles
Part of our “Windows as a Service” evolution is that we do not “ship” Windows the same way we did before Windows 10. We leverage our real-time detection and response capabilities to roll out Windows in a careful and data-driven way, and this represents some of the most impactful changes we have made to improve the Windows experience.

The first principle of a feature update rollout is to only update devices that our data shows will have a good experience. One of our most recent improvements is to use a machine learning (ML) model to select the devices that are offered updates first. If we detect that your device might have an issue, we will not offer the update until that issue is resolved.

Second among our principles is to start slowly – to prioritize the update experience over rollout velocity. When a new feature update release is available, we first make it available to a small percentage of “seekers,” users who take action to get the updates early.

Third, we monitor carefully to learn about new issues. We do this by watching our telemetry, closely partnering with our customer service team to understand what customers report to us, analyzing feedback logs and screenshots directly through our Feedback Hub, and listening to signals sent through social media channels. If we find a combination of factors that results in a bad experience, we create a block that prevents similar devices from receiving an update until a full resolution occurs. We continue to look at ways to improve our ability to detect issues, especially high-impact issues where there is low volume and potentially weak signals. To improve our capability to recognize low-volume issues, we recently added the ability for users to indicate the impact or severity of issues when they provide us feedback.

Responsive and transparent

Even a multi-element detection process will miss issues in an ecosystem as large, diverse and complex as Windows. While we will always work diligently to eliminate issues before rollout, there is always a chance an issue may occur. When this happens, we strive to minimize the impact and respond quickly and transparently to inform and protect our customers. Our focus until now has been almost exclusively on detecting and fixing issues quickly, and we will increase our focus on transparency and communication. We believe in transparency as a principle and we will continue to invest in clear and regular communications with our customers when there are issues. Of course, we have a responsibility to protect customers, and in some cases (e.g. zero-day exploits) we prioritize that protection over transparency until security updates are released and we can again be clear about an issue.

Just the beginning…

We are working on many fronts to ensure our customers have the best, most secure experience on Windows. While we do see positive trends, we also hear clearly the voices of our users who are facing frustrating issues, and we pledge to do more. We will up our effort to improve our ability to prevent issues and our ability to respond quickly and openly when issues do arise. We intend to leverage all the tools we have today and focus on new quality-focused innovation across product design, development, validation and delivery. We look forward to sharing more about our approach to quality and emerging quality-focused innovation in future posts.
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Source: Windows 10 Quality approach for a complex ecosystem - Windows Experience Blog

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NGeo · Dec 19, 2018

The Ultimate Realtek HD Audio Driver Mod for Windows 10

Hey Dj Urko, I am trying to install the realtek driver and I get the error 0x0001. I have disabled secure boot and Driver signature. I have the latest win 10 build. What am I doing wrong? Can u post the complete list of steps that I have to take? I have an asus z170 with alc1150.
Thanks in advance

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