So many drivers...

Hi all,

Anyone who added "Drivers" to their WSUS synchronization options may have noticed a large number of driver updates showing up in their WSUS server recently, and the majority of them have the same title. We wanted to let you know what's going on and what we are doing about it.

First lets talk about the root cause. Drivers can target one or more hardware IDs, and we have a limitation in our data-model so that each "update" can only support a single hardware ID. What that means is that a single driver is often implemented as multiple updates, all with the same title. What happened recently is a few drivers were released to WSUS that supported a very large number of hardware IDs.

It turns out the proper fix for this is not simple; it involves changes to WSUS, WUA, WU, and our driver publishing pipeline to allow a single driver update to support multiple hardware IDs. We have made a number of these changes already, but all this won't come online until some time after the next WSUS release. A number of folks have asked "can't you just do some quick change to the WSUS UI to group them together" and unfortunately that is an even more complex change to make (although in the WSUS 3 UI update view, we do have a "group by" feature that allows one to at least group the updates by title - but that's only a small part of update handling).

In the short term, we will be making some publishing policy changes to ensure that drivers with a large number of hardware IDs don't flow to WSUS through WSUS/MU server synch. This doesn't mean the drivers won't be available to WSUS - they can still be imported from the MU catalog site (from the WSUS 3 UI, go to the "Updates" node and select "import..."). It's just that they won't flow automatically and surprise those who have added drivers to their synch options.

-Marc Shepard

WSUS Lead Program Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  It looks like a heap of video drivers have been dropped to WSUS today in the same way.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I want to ask, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 can use the same drivers, but why can't I update the same drivers on Windows Server 2008 which can update on Windows Vista?

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  System Center Essentials is built on top of Windows Server Updates Services (WSUS) technologies. This

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  As you have removed your 'Contact Us' page and are rarely seen in the TechNet WSUS Forums here is a link to a post regarding the WSUS Silverlight update KB953838 that is being detected to be installed on Server Core 2008 machines. http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/en-US/winservercore/thread/6c29f3c2-735c-40e8-8f6e-c2591c00f489/

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Also MS should release newer Intel WLAN Drv. by MU cause old drivers (v10.5) will freeze XP installing SP3

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Hello, my name is Joe Tindale and I am a Support Escalation Engineer with the WSUS team. As some of you

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Whilst on this subject can you look at the email notifications - the New Update alert email contains one row per platform whereas the Update view consolidates this to one update which is much easier to read.

• Anonymous
  July 16, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 16, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 17, 2008
  I agree with Jay, this is a terrible experience today and should be fixed end to end before allowing us to get "spammed" by default. Further, i would like improved user experience with WSUS for drivers so i can pivot or group by "vendor" type. Will WU catalog also be updated???? Thank you rst

• Anonymous
  July 17, 2008
  This must really be one heck of a problem for MS to fix, because this same thing was blogged about here more than 10 months ago (http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2007/09/07/ati-radeon-graphic-card-updates-3892.aspx).   Looking forward to the fixed release of WSUS..

• Anonymous
  July 17, 2008
  Why you don't publish the latest NVIDIA e ATI drivers via Windows Update? Microsoft signs these drivers so you should publish them on Windows Update

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2008
  Our WSUS server was already struggling and the thousands of duplicate updates has pretty much brought it to a stand still. It keeps timing out when viewing unapproved updates! Is there anykind of patch or script to decline or remove these updates from the backend?

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2008
  hey the problem is driver publishing, WU generally is good for most things but drivers .. why??? Fix driver publishing or remove it from WU please!

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2008
  It would be nice if Microsoft would expire these 10000 Realtek audio drivers, it takes a lot of time to decline them manually! The WSUS management console times out and loose the connection when trying to decline too many updates at once!

• Anonymous
  August 25, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 07, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2008
  Whilst on this subject can you look at the email notifications - the New Update alert email contains one row per platform whereas the Update view consolidates this to one update which is much easier to read. Also, can we please have a report showing which new categories and products have been synced so we don't have to come to the blog to find them!

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2008
  This sh*tload of drivers also causes SBS 2003 performance reports to be blank. Turn off driver downloads and run wsus_driver_decline.exe from http://www.codeplex.com/WSUS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=16459

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• Anonymous
  January 17, 2013
  I read this in bemusement as I'm declining 12,000 and change Realtek drivers on the wrong side of a "wsusutil.exe reset" command...

• Anonymous
  February 06, 2013
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• Anonymous
  February 20, 2014
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  No wonder WSUS has performance issues.