Windows 11 was the time to do so, and they missed it. I'd bet it was assessed, briefly, as too big a change to be acceptable if old devices were not going to be compatible.
The solution would be simply to add a warning as a temporary measure preferably in red text and in a way that would scare the average user. This warning should be accompanied by a call to action urging users to contact the device manufacturer and ask them to release a new driver. Then companies would have no choice but to either create a new driver that runs in user space or be constantly inundated with support requests from customers.
Unfortunately that doesn't work, when a warning sits between a user and the application they want to run, they will always say yes, and then someone has to clean all those browser toolbars.
Win 11 already invalidated quite a few relatively modern systems. As far as I know, it was an arbitrary threshold which has not materialized into an actual hardware requirement to run. As a joke, someone installed Win11 on a computer with a Pentium 4.
Microsoft did break backwards compatibility with some drivers (packed stuff that relied on being able to write to executable sections, for instance) w/ HVCI and then with some other stuff (for instance, drivers using push+ret for obfuscating function calls + some exception handling related machinery some virtualization based obfuscators used) with KCET.
With that being said virtualization based security is not mandatory, though compliance is needed for signing new drivers. I think next backwards compatibility breaking move will be enabling SMAP.
Assuming you want to preserve the same functionality of drivers, how would giving the userspace RGB controller driver the same set of tools (usually fun things like physical memory RW) change anything?
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 4.4 ms ] threadApparently Microsoft still can't play an Apple move, in the quest to do so.
With that being said virtualization based security is not mandatory, though compliance is needed for signing new drivers. I think next backwards compatibility breaking move will be enabling SMAP.
Outside desktop, they are pretty much around on embedded RTOS, and the Switch.