I'm upset about FreeBSD

[Ian Smith]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:52:15 +0200, Yamagi Burmeister wrote:
 > On Mon, 17 Oct 2016 03:44:14 +0300
 > Rostislav Krasny <rosti.bsd at gmail.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > First of all I faced an old problem that I reported here a year ago:
 > > http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.stable/96598
 > > Completely new USB flash drive flashed by the
 > > FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-i386-mini-memstick.img file kills every Windows
 > > again. If I use the Rufus util to write the img file (using DD mode)
 > > the Windows dies immediately after the flashing. If I use the
 > > Win32DiskImager (suggested by the Handbook) it doesn't reinitialize
 > > the USB storage and Windows dies only if I remove and put that USB
 > > flash drive again or boot Windows when it is connected. Nothing was
 > > done to fix this nasty bug for a year.
 > 
 > As was already said in the other answers this is a bug in Windows.
 > Particulary in the partition parser. partmgr.sys (running in kernel
 > mode) crashes while parsing the FreeBSD installation images GPT
 > setup. This may be a variant of the bug known as "Kindle is crashing
 > Win 10":
 > 
 > http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-performance/plugging-in-kindle-is-crashing-windows-10-after/5db0d867-0822-4512-919e-3d7786353f95?page=1

It's interesting that people primarily oriented to Windows tend to say 
'X crashes my Windows' rather than 'my Windows crashes when X happens', 
so your far more cluey approach is refreshing in this regard ..

 > That bug was patched on september 13 and I'm unable to reproduce the
 > crash on a fully patched Win 10 VM. But there's no patch for Win 7,
 > even with all patches applied my Win 7 VM is still crashing as soon
 > as the FreeBSD installation image is connected.

Amazing; what we'd call a kernel panic due to merely inserting a device.

 > I did some debugging and I'm pretty sure that the problem is not the
 > pmbr used for classic BIOS boot but the GPT itself. But my knowledge
 > of GPT and especially Windows internals is limit. So maybe someone 
 > with more insight can look into this. 

If FreeBSD GPT images (and Kindle readers) can trigger this, so could a 
theoretically unlimited combination of data on block 2 of USB media; 
modifying FreeBSD to fix a Windows bug should be out of the question.

 > Or even better: Complain to Microsoft. Even if the GPT is invalid it
 > should crash the kernel.

Well, exactly so, given s/should/should not/ .. and they'll have at 
least three images to test against: 10.3 (i386 only) and 11.0 (amd64 
and i386) apart from the Kindles; should be a clue or two in there ..

cheers, Ian