Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Computerphile" channel.

@irql2 according to retired microsoft engineer dave plumer, they had it marked as boot critical according to his sources. i have no reason to doubt his statement. despite how unimpressed i am with various choices Microsoft has made, i have no reason to doubt the quality of their engineers. that is why i am sure they are capable of determining if it is actually boot critical when the driver is being signed. i am also sure that they are capable of writing code which will use that determination to down grade the driver and disable it if it is too broken to boot, and to check if it is stuck in a boot loop. for any os, as long as you can get to startup, and use the net, you can fix the driver with an update without having to manually login to all the locked down machines. the fact that they have not bothered to implement such a measure when this has happened before is disappointing.
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@irql2 yes it was, but the decision as to if it can be downgraded should be Microsofts. just because they want it to prevent booting if it cannot start does not mean that windows cannot start without it.
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no, mccaffee did the same thing while the crowdstrike ceo was working there causing similar problems. all any os needs to do to not have the boot loop which caused this problem to be severe is as each kernel driver is started flag up that it started, and when it returns clear the flag. as long as the flag is stored in a way that survives rebooting, it can just disable the driver next boot, and no boot loop. then it can just update as normal by just turning the machine of and back on. nobody does it though.
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@throwaway6478 it should not matter. boot critical should be aspirational. microsoft should be able to downgrade it if it borks the kernel. once it has been downgraded, it can just not be loaded if it does it again, so the third time the kernel boots without the driver, and their user land software can detect it has been disabled, phone home, and upgrade. no need to have thousands of tech support guys manually visiting machines all day. or at least it could work like that if they had implemented it After mccaffee basically did the same thing when the ceo used to work there.
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