
Windows 8 to feature stripped-down kernel, built-in virtualization - jfruh
http://www.itworld.com/virtualization/189289/windows-8-hyper-v-and-minwin-game-changing-strategy
======
munchhausen
Where did I hear this before...ah, yes, I remember now:

 _Stripped-down 'MinWin' kernel to be at the core of Windows 7 and more_
[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/stripped-down-minwin-
ker...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/stripped-down-minwin-kernel-to-be-
at-the-core-of-windows-7-and-more/842)

~~~
Umofomia
MinWin is not so much a product as it is a continual effort starting with
Vista to untangle dependencies and move unnecessary cruft out. It's still the
NT kernel, only progressively cleaner with each additional release of Windows.

~~~
watmough
Here's a great Coding Horror article on shrinking Windows XP. Jeff got it down
to a 243 MB compressed image, for an XP virtual machine.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/creating-smaller-
vi...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/creating-smaller-virtual-
machines.html)

Really cool stuff.

edit: s/XP/NT/

~~~
ProNihilist
Before Vista came out I managed to cut down an XP image to ~200MB in ISO form
and less than 300MB on a "fresh" install on real hardware ("fresh" because it
was Service Pack 3+ slipstreamed into the install ISO).

That was basically the bare minimum needed to run the OS on my laptop with
wifi and sound.

Put something similar on my EeePC 701 when I got it, having a 6/7 second boot
time on Windows was quite nice;

------
brudgers
Virtualization makes a lot of sense as the basis for an OS - instead of
organizing projects into files and directories and trying to manage those with
a master OS - just run a new instance of the OS for each project and access
just the relevant resources - most of the stuff on a typical user's desktop
machine is often irrelevant to the task at at hand. A new VM for a specific
project allows the user to save state - work on the draft of the TPS report
for an hour, then shut down that virtual machine; come back a week later and
everything is just as you left it - same open files, same running programs,
everything just the way you want it.

In some ways it's the equivalent of tabbed browsing or application windowing -
virtualization of the OS creates efficiency by dealing with multiple divergent
contexts at the same time.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Except that, while working on their TPS report they opened a browser window to
check some figures. And they bookmarked the site they found.

And then they moved onto a different project, and their browser bookmark
wasn't there.

And now they're not happy, because Windows lost their stuff.

(Because very little of what most people do can be compartmentalized that much
- and Windows is great because it allows you to multitask, which you can't do
if everything is in a different VM.)

~~~
kenjackson
Why are their bookmarks not cloud synced? Virtualization makes even more sense
when you push as much as makes sense to the cloud, include things like
personalization settings.

~~~
AndrewDucker
I don't know anyone outside of geeks and friends/family that geeks have set up
that have Bookmark sync, let alone people in large businesses where their
desktops are run by the IS department.

~~~
kenjackson
I don't disagree. But as we move to a world with more virtualized environments
and multiple devices, I think it will be more common. At the very least iCloud
will make it standard in the iOS/OSX space. I can't help but believe MS will
do the same for Win8.

~~~
AndrewDucker
I hope MS do that. Although they'd have to allow internal syncing servers for
it to be acceptable for IS departments.

------
ComputerGuru
The problem with Windows has never been with the kernel. The NT kernel is
(mainly) fast, secure, and modular. In a study of pros and cons, it will
compare favorably with other kernels of today.

Windows' problem is, has always been, and promises to continue to be, purely
in userland. The userland is bloated and without focus; it reeks of design by
committee, is riddled with security issues stemming from design of userspace
and user interaction requirements, and by-and-large simply lacks a unifying
theme/purpose for the OS itself.

------
kogir
If the performance is acceptable, I'd love to do all of my daily Windows work
from a VM... on a removable drive I can boot with no fuss on my desktop,
laptop, or friends' computer.

If they can really isolate all the hardware this is a game changer for me.
I'll just move my SSD seamlessly between various PCs at home and work. Epic
win.

Don't dimiss this as a power user feature just yet. Imagine going on vacation
and taking one computer for your family, not 4. Get a new computer? Don't
"migrate" with current solutions, move everything with full fidelity. Keep
your own personal OS for use at internet cafes. Change the form factor of your
computer at will.

~~~
encoderer
My development machine is Windows7. I do web and systems development in
Python, PHP, etc.

All of my development is done on Ubuntu and CentOS VMs running in VirtualBox.

My actual IDE is often Eclipse (or Eclipse based) and I just make an SSH/SFTP
connection to each virtualbox and the coding is treated as a "remote project"
in Eclipse.

When I retire this Sony Vaio, I'm really thinking I'll get a 15" Macbook. Just
for variety. There was a time when I'd never have dreamed of that. I bill a
high hourly rate, I cannot be fumbling around because I'm on an unfamiler OS.

But I could switch to a Mac in 60 minutes. Downnload a JVM and VirtualBox for
OSX, move over all my VM images, and I'm done. Back to work.

I chose Windows 7 because IMO it's the best OS available for me. I enjoy it. I
never have reliability issues. I find I usually go 30, 40 days between
restarts. It's nice I have this option: the chip and OS makers have really
done a smashing job on visualization technology over the last decade.

------
politician
The cynic in me says that this is just hype that'll go the way of
Longhorn/WinFS by the time they ship.

~~~
watmough
They already have a lightweight core running, they've reduced usage for idle
machines, and they've had vx in server versions for ages.

Hopefully it will stay, at least in the higher end consumer packages at least.
Definitely looking forward to Windows 8.

------
stock_toaster
I wonder if more pervasive os level virtualization for windows would allow
them to 'virtualize' some of the legacy APIs and provide a means for moving
their apis forward/cleanup/etc while still maintaining their backwards
compatibility.

~~~
eru
Don't they already do this partly? Especially when running old 16-bit
programmes.

~~~
stock_toaster
Ah. Mayhaps. I thought they did that with some custom api translation, but I
could indeed be wrong.

------
oskee80
I really like the new look of explorer with the ribbon:
<http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/HyperV-11-600.png>

Wish I could get that on Win7.

------
quattrofan
So my question is why not throw away Windows, start from scratch and build new
state of the art OS and then HV for backward compatibility?

------
glhaynes
Sounds battery-expensive.

------
damoncali
What does this allow me to do that I couldn't before? (Serious question - this
article is over my head).

------
js4all
It would be much better for Windows, if it would be based on a BSD kernel
instead of using a newly developed kernel. Legacy apps could then be executed
using virtualization. Doing so Microsoft would have a lot of capacity to
improve their windowing system and desktop on top. This would also open
Windows for serious software development.

~~~
daeken
This is not a new kernel, and there is absolutely no way in which moving to a
BSD kernel would solve anything at all.

The NT kernel in and of itself is very small, simple, and remarkably well
designed. The Win32 subsystem is what is horrid, and that's 99.9% in
userspace. There's no reason that they can't create a whole new subsystem
along side Win32 where they improve everything, but I don't see that
happening.

~~~
rbanffy
> The NT kernel in and of itself is very small, simple, and remarkably well
> designed.

Is there current documentation on that? I remember NT3 had a very microkernel-
ish design, but I have also read that a lot of its elegance was compromised
since NT4.

~~~
daeken
As said in a sibling comment, Windows Internals is a must-read. However, you
are correct -- NT4, 2000, and XP saw the addition of lots of stuff inside of
ring0. However, most of that was independent of the actual NT kernel, and
since Vista the trend has been reversing in a huge way. There's more in ring0
than there was back in the day, but a lot of stuff has been moved out, e.g.
many drivers, even video drivers. The new (relatively speaking) usermode
driver framework makes it trivial to write drivers that don't run in ring0,
and the kernel now has fewer dependencies than ever.

NT has had some growing pains architecturally speaking, but it's been handled
remarkably well. Probably the best thing to ever come out of MS, especially
when you contrast it to the mess that is the Win32 subsystem.

