Thursday, May 29, 2008

Windows 7 Won't Have Compact "MinWin" Kernel

From Slashdot

Calm down.

MinWin is not some magical new kernel. It is Windows with every single feature stripped out - It is the base ingredient of any version of Windows. (I forget the exact size. But it is pretty tiny - small enough for embedded stuff.)

We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything 'componentizable' - So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008). (So, all those blog posts out there with titles like 'How Microsoft can fix Windows 7: Make it modular!'...Uh, yeah. Welcome to three (four? five?) years ago.)

Why is this a good idea?
With not much more than some XML tweaking, we could create Windows Server 2008 Server Core: A version of Windows Server that is nothing more than just a web server. Or a file server (or whatever you choose to configure it as) - This means you can get a version of Windows Server with fewer things loaded in memory, fewer things running that can get hacked, fewer things that need to be updated. Pretty cool.

About the kernel:
The 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 kernel has evolved quite nicely over the years, and (in my opinion) is one of the best bits of code we have. You do not, and should not, do a total rewrite of a kernel in a widely-used OS between releases. Writing a piece of code is a tiny fraction of the work required to ship a bit of software - you have to test every single line of it, find the security bugs, make sure it works for every customer on every bit of hardware, etc etc.

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

So anyway:
You already have MinWin - It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose - you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don't know what the hell you'd do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.

32 comments:

lordabdul said...

Although people probably underestimate how good (or at least "not too bad") the Windows code is, I think what most people really mean by "we want a more modular windows" is that they want more control over those modules.
For example, right now, we get gigabytes of side-by-side dlls and other legacy/backwards compatibility stuff. Although this is super useful for businesses and workstations, I'd love to have a "clean and shiny" version of Windows for home where old and badly written applications wouldn't work. I *want* things to break if they haven't been recompiled/updated for 3 years, or are simply badly written. No fancy workarounds for UAC or anything.
Being able to install such a trimmed down version of Windows as part of the user experience might be nice.
Then again, I'm a customer, I might not know what I really want :)

Mario said...

I know that Windows Vista and Server 2008 have a good kernel, the thing that lacks in Vista is the capability to choose what to load and what to don't load. I don't mean that users should be forced to choose by themselves (I don't think I would be able), but a little costumization would have made Vista a more wide-accepted system.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I agree with the above, and I could see this being implemented in the "Turn Windows features on or off". It's hidden enough that only power users will play with it, yet still relatively accessible. For example, you could have a checkbox for "Compatibility with legacy windows", with this being enabled by default

Rob Cooper said...

I also agree with the above comments, I happen to love Vista, and look forward to seeing the improvements in 7. The more I use it, the more I love it, the interface is refreshing and I havent switched it off in quite literally months (other than resets for updates) without a single hitch.

I think the key concept here is that we *ALL* want moduralisation! Its better for you guys at MS building the product, it can help offer us customers a truly customised solution.

I share much the same attitude as "lord". I would rather have [outdated] things not work on a system that is as lean as *I* want it, than have bloated system that is trying to be uber-compatible. If I then need to install module to get a piece of software to run, fine, so be it..

Truly empowering the user would be an strong and impressive step for MS to take, this would help dispel the "closed doors" and "too many versions to make more money" myths. There will be one version for the customer. THEIR version.

Donny said...

What I really want from 7 is some real performance increase. I like the way Vista looks and its new features...especially the built in search. But I still took it off my laptop because it was a PIG! My laptop has 2 cores and 2gigs of ram and Vista still ran slow. There's no excuse for that. It needs to run either as fast as XP or faster or I won't use it. :-(

JG said...

What you say about modularization is true, but unlike Server 2008, there is no good Interface for the user to accomplish this "leaning down," so it's useless banter more or less. Ok, so there's http://www.vlite.net/ but really, one guy reverse engineering the system does not exactly like a vendor designed system

I've thought for about a year now that, you know, server 2008-core may just be a killer gaming OS. Well, almost. Lack of .Net may be the killer. Can you install DirectX on server core?

Honestly though, if you guys can make a "server core" style interface for the advanced user you would likely turn around this tide of negativity that you see. Oh wait...you already did this years ago and it's called XP embedded--err sorry what's it called this week?--Windows Embedded.

I took a virtual lab on using the embedded tools once and if all that was polished up a bit and updated to vista/Win7 with some slick documentation it would be really killer

I can understand the challenges related to supporting such a beast but I'm sure the lawyers can come up with something to the effect of "unsupported," "at your own risk only," etc....

Preatty please?

Ken Roberts said...

How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?

Ubuntu is NOT Linux - it's a distribution. If you want an MS equivalent of a distribution, then think of MS Home/Business/Pro/Multimedia/CE/etc. of Windows.

Last time I checked, Ubuntu uses the Linux kernel (like all of the Linux distributions do), and Mac OSX uses the BSD kernel.

Linux distributions do not control what goes into the kernel proper (unlike MS, who controls everything about their O/S).

Since he is striving to be accurate in detailing the MS offerings, I would hope he would strive to be accurate in all of the information he's posting.

Unknown said...

Do you really understand what Mac OSX is? It is built on top of the Mach kernel, do you know how many times the Mach kernel was rewritten from scratch? Hell do you know how many times the l4 kernel was written from scratch, how many flavors and how many different languages? Let's face it, Vista is a major set back, it is slow. Why would it take 9 minutes to install MSQL Express on XP and 45 minutes to install it on Vista? Unfortunately, Vista was pretty new then, however, that was around the time everyone was noting the slowness of the OS, and we happened to have finished the application to install on XP and Vista, and all the company execs saw was it was taking a hell of a long time to install. They didn't notice it wasn't even our application that was taking the long part, it was MSQL that was taking so long to install.

bhargav said...

I have a vaio with 1 gig for RAM and mac osx
1) Mac boot time is faster
2) Applications run faster
3) Os itself seems responsive

Vista,
Removed all aero effects, side bar, all tweaks I could find.
"STILL VERY SLOW", takes forever to boot, norton antivirus slow, windows update keeps running all the time.
Networking and wireless stuff slow.
Vista is a piece of crap.

Xepol said...

I believe you will find is that people want to alter their own system, and don't really care that MS can create yet another SKU easily.

The end users want more control over the process, not yet another confusing product sku. If it was changed so I could click a button that said "install a text console based webserver that runs in 256megs on a pentium II and does nothing else of note", then maybe you would start to be getting to what people really wanted.

TheTaz said...

I'm going to Rant since it seems you guys at MS have lost touch with your customers...

Windows is ridiculously bloated. (Kernel or not)

There's tons of stuff turned on by default, and tons of stuff bundled, that most people don't NEED.

~I don't need 15000 handles open at an Idle Desktop.
~I don't need 15 GB OS garbage for an Idle Desktop.
~I don't need my CPU spiking 5%-10% utilization at Idle Desktop.
~I don't need EVERYTHING Pre-fetched.
~I don't need 40+ processes running in the background.
~I don't need tons of MS crap the phones home (Not just talking WGA).

What I do Need is:

~An OS that uses very little resources and dedicates most of my resources to the APPLICATIONS that I run.
~An OS that can use the full 4GB of Physical RAM if 32-Bit, and can dedicate more than 2GB to a single process.
~An OS with no ARTIFICIAL limitations on how many processors I can have or how much RAM I can have.
~An OS that basically ONLY: launches applications, manages memory, multi-tasks well, has network connectivity, manages modern hardware, A basic functional Desktop, and has compatibility with all Windows 32-Bit Applications. PERIOD.

Unfortunately, in the Microsoft World that will never happen. It's about control. All the Phone-Home-Ware is to have control over your machine. All the Bundled CRAP (IE, Media Player, Messenger, etc.) is to control content and attempt to create vendor-lock.

Other than gaming, I have absolutely NO use for an MS OS, at home (I do everything else on a Mac and Linux Boxes). So what MS needs to make is a stripped down "Gaming" OS (XBox OS + Desktop?) that runs all windows 32-bit Apps. Hell, I'd even pay the "Ultimate Version" price for that.

I'm really getting sick and tired of the "What Intel giveth, MS takes away" paradigm. It's just stupidity at this point, not "Innovation". It's just sloppy-@ss coding that programmers have let become the "Status Quo", unlike the Mainframe days where quality and tight code was essential... and IT people were actually respected and awed. Nowadays we're looked upon as "Those overpaid dumb-@ss IT Jerks", thanks mostly to MS.

Anonymous said...

TheTaz, first of all, there's a technical reason that 32-bit Windows cannot use 4Gb of RAM. 32-bit means that the largest amount of memory that can be addressed is 2^32 = 4Gb. Some of this address space is needed for hardware devices, buses etc. so there's a limit of 3Gb for physical RAM. So you need a 64-bit address space.

Secondly, those "crap" features are for people less comfortable with computers than you. I don't think Windows is suited for your needs, if you need a more "hardcore" OS, try a Linux distribution like Slackware. Or if you want a "stripped-down gaming OS", get an Xbox or PS3.

Finally, if you believe that Windows is so bad, why don't YOU come along and build a better OS? Not so easy, is it?

Anthony Lawrence said...

The nicest thing I can say about Vista is that it actually isn't as awful as I thought it would be.

I think it's very telling that just a few years ago none of my neighbors knew that there was any OS BUT Microsoft and today they all know about Macs and Linux and some of them have even switched. I bet in another five years a lot more will have.

Kai Yao said...

About Mugunth Kumar comment about slow standby times, that's because Vista actually does some "safe standby" thing (you can disable that) where it basically copies the contents of the RAM to the hard disk (like hibernate in XP). However, the contents are still kept in RAM, so unlike hibernate, resuming the computer is very fast. The advantage of this "safe standby" is that, if your laptop runs out of battery (or if the battery dislodges or something like that) your data is not lost as it has already been copied to the hard disk.

babylon said...

My idea is let people choose what features they want to be include with their operating system before make a purchase just like when you want to buy a PC online so, you can customize it and see the price and the size before you make an order. Another thing is Microsoft also need to include a commercial package manager to make it easier to purchase a software online and it will be delivered using the internet.

Brad said...

I'm happy I stopped using Windows. The developers seem unorganized and makes the end-user feel less confident about the product.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

This article is full of fallacies and inconsistencies, there's no way anyone associated with the Windows kernel could try to pass junk like this off as intellectual talk. Shipping Seven is fake.

Tihiy said...

Yes, stupid chap fake shit.

Sonu Singh said...

What do you have to say about this: http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/shipping-seven-is-a-fraud/


Well?

randomshinichi said...

Who cares if Windows's kernel is light and fast or not. End users aren't seeing the performance/benefits of that kernel being light and fast. Isn't that why the kernel was made light and fast in the first place?

And what's with Vista having 60 processes running by default? XP only had somewhere around 20 processes - does Vista count processes differently?

lmaxmai said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Josh the Nerd said...

Mahmoud, Sonu Singh, please read No, that doesn't make Shipping Seven a fraud

Anonymous said...

just make the other release 64 bit only and it will run as smooth as mac os.

Soma said...

Read this: http://jtntech.blogspot.com/2008/06/no-that-doesnt-make-shipping-seven.html

That pretty much sums up the next post I was going to do; I want to get some sun today while I can.

My point was that once you've shipping an OS to millions of people (and other people depend on your APIs in weird and wonderful ways), you are not really in the position to radically change or rewrite things. (We're trying to do that, but that's a topic for another day)

I'm going to wrong in the long term with the following statement, but (at this point) the Mac OS X kernel is not going to be rewritten *from scratch*. It will get major overhauls, sure. But nobody is going to rewrite it from scratch.

I should not have used Ubuntu as an example; appcompat and shipping shedules in the opensource world are still very different from the commercial software world.

scsi said...

Customization? Maybe Microsoft shouldn't have sold Xenix. And yes, control is good.

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