
Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux - l1n
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debian/
======
Someone1234
The article says "Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux," but the
linked Github repository says:

> Q. Is SONiC a Linux distribution?

> A. No, SONiC is a collection of networking software components required to
> have a fully functional L3 device that can be agnostic of any particular
> Linux distribution. Today SONiC runs on Debian

~~~
daveloyall
This article has changed since the last time I read it, minutes ago. It didn't
used to have that link, and it used to speculate that the supposed linux
distro would be MIT licensed.

...There are several things I don't like about this article.

~~~
chadzawistowski
> it used to speculate that the supposed linux distro would be MIT licensed

That doesn't sound very credible of them. The kernel is stuck as GPL; that
won't change anytime soon.

~~~
cyphar
Distributions can have licenses. Most modern distributions are MIT licensed
(meaning you can create derivative distributions under the conditions of the
license). OpenSUSE is still GPLv2 and is one of the last ones (Debian switched
to MIT recently IIRC).

~~~
pjc50
What does that actually mean, though? It can't affect the software being
distributed. Is it only the distro tools themselves?

~~~
cyphar
The actual collection of software called the distribution. That's what is
being licensed.

~~~
pjc50
But most of that software will be licensed under other licenses, and you can't
just redistribute it under another license!

If you ship a collection of software called a "distribution" that includes a
copy of the Linux kernel, then that copy of the kernel remains GPL. The fact
that it's on the same CD or server as some other MIT-licensed software is
irrelevant.

~~~
cyphar
A collective work is separate from a derived work. These are two separate
things in copyright law. You can own the copyright over a library of music,
despite not owning the copyright over the actual music itself. So, you could
have a proprietary Linux distribution that is only made up of GPL'd software.
The only thing that would be "proprietary" is the particular configuration,
selection and build scripts of the packages that you picked.

So, having a GPL'd distribution means that the package sources and
configurations and other such "distribution sources" have to follow the rules
of the GPL. It doesn't matter what the license of the software itself is (it
can even be GPL-incompatible or proprietary).

------
caf
In tangentially-related news, there was a lot of talk at NetDev about
switchdev, a new Linux driver model for hardware-offload switching hardware.

It allows the kernel's Layer-2 and Layer-3 switching/routing configuration to
be reflected down into the switch offload hardware, and the switch's ARP and
MAC table data to be reflected back up to the kernel stack.

The overall idea being you can continue to use the same userspace tools to
configure the routing/switching, and it all just magically goes faster if you
have supported switching hardware.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/675826/](https://lwn.net/Articles/675826/)

~~~
devicenull
Sounds like the Cumulus Linux approach (they use some daemon called switchd
iirc)

~~~
kijiki
We (Cumulus) have been involved in switchdev since the beginning. Over the
long term, it will replace switchd in our products, but that is at least a
year out, maybe two.

\- nolan co-founder, CTO @Cumulus

~~~
yusyusyus
Appreciate Cumulus' work in this area. As a network "engineer", the burden of
administering switches is horrible. Downside is though, getting more switch
SoCs talking to Linux makes me wish I wasn't automating configs right now.

------
harry8
I imagine anything Microsoft releases that could possibly have gpl software,
such as the linux kernel in it will have the most aggressive search for
violation of any software ever. Memories are long and that distrust is not
going away any time soon.

~~~
click170
Frankly the knife cuts both ways.

Microsoft has a long way to go before they get the benefit of the doubt from
me due to their decades of Embracing Extending and Extinguishing.

~~~
baldfat
I might be wrong about you personally and I am speaking of the Linux Community
as a whole.

I still find it incredibly hypocritical of people's anti-Microsoft stance
while they walk around with their Apple products. I seriously see more Macs at
every Linux event then any other kind of computer. Most Anti-Microsoft really
is anti-Steve Ballmer.

~~~
d0lph
I think Apple at least has not tried to strategically attack linux/OSS via
rumors and lies a la halloween documents.

But I certainly agree that the linux community on a whole should re-evaluate
its position on MS. If you expect that to happen over night, you are a fool.

~~~
baldfat
Once again that is Steve Ballmer. If this was a whole corporate belief it
would have been true through the whole company and its policy and it wasn't.

NOT defending the bad parts of MS but people treat MS as the evil empire when
it was a divided HUGE company. Inside MS there were plenty of positive open
source people and projects inside of MS.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-
sourc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-
source_software#Microsoft.27s_contributions_to_open_source)

I believe the Anti-MS is way out of proportion and distracts from worse
offenders. Look at Oracle that company is the devil to Open/Free software and
people will still run Oracle products all the time. (Stares at my own OpenBox
for use with Vagrant on my Windows machine next to me). IBM and their
incredible patent farm (IBM year in and year out the number one patent company
in America).

Apple is the polar opposite of the open source movement. Apple has been guilty
of price fixing ebooks, patent misuse and the copyrighting of design and slide
to unlock. Apple does not work with the community but behind high secret
walls. You share a secret and they might send the police after you or sue you.
They black list reporters that share an opinion that is negative to Apple from
access to the company, events and products.

So yes MS has made many bad moves but I wouldn't even say they are the worst.
If you take out anything Steve Ballmer has said they are actually were better
then most.

Open Source Movement has won and we should celebrate the victories. SQL Server
on Linux I wouldn't have thought this in a million years and C# opened. These
are amazing days.

~~~
d0lph
Even given all that MSFT has been more antagonistic to Linux in the past.
Ballmer was not even CEO when the halloween docs we released, I find it
difficult to believe, that Ballmer is the sole cause of MSFTs anti OSS
positions.

TBH I agree with you on most points, but calling linux users who have mac
hardware hypocrites is a stretch given MSFT's track record.

------
coldtea
Well, Microsoft had the best (and most widely deployed) desktop UNIX
distribution back in the 80s too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix)

------
chris_wot
Satya Nadella is a breath of fresh air. It's amazing the difference in
management styles from the Balmer days.

When Microsoft put Nadella in charge, they made a great decision. And I
honestly don't say that very often about top level management.

~~~
brudgers
To a first approximation all the engineers producing these products were
already at Microsoft before Nadella became CEO. Microsoft's first open source
project is more than ten years old. Scott Hanselman's _Hansel Minutes_ podcast
covers the period before and after his hiring and documents his experience of
the long cultural shift, e.g. ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft's relationship with Mono
and Moonlight, and a bunch of smaller projects.

To put it another way, Nadella's appointment wasn't a _coup d 'etat_.
Microsoft under Ballmer ejected several hard chargers in line for the throne
and they weren't the one's who saw open source as the way forward.

~~~
chris_wot
I've never quite forgotten that Ballmer accused anyone involved in Open Source
as Communinists. Not to mention he said that Linux was a "cancer".

Or to be precise, he said that:

 _" [W]e have a problem ... when the government funds open-source work.
Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open
source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is
written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of
your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the
public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer
that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it
touches. That's the way that the license works."_

and of Linux and Communism:

 _" There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet
Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the
characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it.
That is, it's free."_

------
cpeterso
They should call it XENIX. :)

~~~
hoodoof
You must be old.

~~~
rbanffy
It's still the finest OS Microsoft ever shipped. ;-)

~~~
hoodoof
I seem to recall Xenix ran on an 80286.

Speaking of which, did anyone ever end up apologising for the 80286?

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Not iirc. But I wasn't around at the time, so nobody told me anything about
what was wrong with the 286 in the first place.

~~~
dsr_
As I recall, it was mostly that backwards-compatibility with 8086 was so
required that they put every useful performance enhancement except raw MHz in
a separate protected mode... and then you couldn't switch between protected
and real mode without (I am not making this up) asking the 8042 processor
controlling the keyboard to hold your beer and reset you, which could take an
agonizingly long time.

~~~
Sanddancer
The 8042 had another "fun" function on the 286 too. Because there were a
number of poorly written programs that expected the memory to roll over at
0x0FFFFF, in order to maintain compatibility, they needed some way of turning
off the A20 line. Now, in order to save money, IBM noticed that there was a
spare pin on the 8042 that they used to control whether or not the A20 pin
would be held low or not. Now, because this became another bit of needed
backward compatibility, a way to assert the A20 pin stuck around until Intel's
Haswell line, several decades after A20 gating was needed.

Also, there was another way of getting the processor back into real mode that
was even more fun. You'd initiate a triple fault to trigger the reset, because
that was faster than asking the 8042 to do it for you. Oh, the good old days.

~~~
rbanffy
I know the PC was designed under a very tight deadline, about a year. I wonder
what the hardware team spent the remaining 10 months...

Someone should apologize for the whole machine...

------
exabrial
In a sudden twist of fate, Microsoft announces that are writing their own
closed source systemd alternative. Millions of naysayers flock to the systemd
hailing it as the Savior of Linux.

~~~
pjc50
I pondered this for a bit wondering what the Microsoft equivalent of systemd
is, and decided it's probably svchost: it runs a bunch of services on your
behalf in an opaque way, and occasionally needs killing when it eats all your
memory.

Microsoft already have binary logging that's much harder to read than text
files. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent to process reaping, or whether
that's handled by the kernel.

~~~
Someone1234
Microsoft's equivalent is called "wininit" and spawns services (inc. svchost
shared process groups and services.exe), lsass ("Local Security Authority
Subsystem Service"), lsm ("Local Session Manager"), winlogon ("Windows Login
subsystem" for session 0), initialises the registry, creates temp if it
doesn't exist, etc. During shutdown after winlogon terminates (session 0
terminates), wininit then sends ExitWindowsEx() to all system processes before
exiting itself.

The two really are 1:1. Windows under the hood is VERY UNIX like. More so than
most people realise.

~~~
csixty4
> The two really are 1:1. Windows under the hood is VERY UNIX like. More so
> than most people realise.

I find this really amusing. I've been reading "Showstopper!: The Breakneck
Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"[1] and Dave
Cutler is described as VERY anti-Unix. He considered it an inelegant system
developed by a bunch of PhDs doing their own thing their own way.

He'd probably hate your comparison.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-
Generati...](http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-
Microsoft-ebook/dp/B00J5X5E9U/ref=sr_1_2)

------
duncan_bayne
Life imitates (comedic) art ...

[http://www.mslinux.org/](http://www.mslinux.org/)

~~~
ericzawo
My first thought too! Somebody check the temperature in hell.

~~~
chris_wot
Lots of opportunities for snowballs it seems.

------
mankash666
Why Linux? The networking stack on BSD is superior, and the OS places no
copyleft restrictions!

I'm starting to believe that developers choose OS/Tools the are used to (Linux
in this case) versus the one best suited for the job (BSD)

~~~
cyphar
> ... and the OS places no copyleft restrictions!

I'm still baffled why people think this is a benefit. If you actually care
about software freedom, lack of copyleft is a bad thing IMO. What's to stop
$EvilCorp from creating a system that is completely locked down, can't be
replaced, and is based on your technology? That's what UEFI is, by the way.
It's only by Microsoft's blessing that you can install alternative operating
systems on new Windows laptops. So please tell me more about why copyleft is a
negative. If TianoCore was GPLv3, UEFI would actually be more bearable to work
with (but core/libreboot is clearly the way to go on from here).

~~~
chei0aiV
FYI, the TianoCore FAT driver is actually non-free thanks to Microsoft.

~~~
cyphar
Actually, Microsoft has provided a patent grant[1][2][3] to anybody who
implements a FAT driver for the purpose of booting UEFI. Which is actually a
reason why FAT is still in the Linux kernel even though people argue that
Microsoft will sue one day.

But IMO we should be all switching to CoreBoot (or LibreBoot). It's much less
fucked up than UEFI, the only negative being that you have to flash it
yourself (unless you buy a $1000 5-year-old Thinkpad).

[1]:
[http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4cc9-843a-923143f3456c/fatgen103.doc)

~~~
chei0aiV
They are still responsible for the non-free license on the TianoCore; Intel
are having to negotiate with Microsoft to change the license, despite being
the copyright holder.

Agreed re not using UEFI. I wouldn't touch CoreBoot though, LibreBoot seems
more sane.

~~~
cyphar
LibreBoot is CoreBoot with certain binary blobs removed. Sure, I agree that
LibreBoot is better from a freedom perspective, I just assumed that you
wouldn't know what LibreBoot is (more people have heard of CoreBoot).

------
criddell
I always thought that Microsoft was blocked from getting into Linux by the
terms of their sale of Xenix.

~~~
cbd1984
I cannot possibly imagine how this could be true.

Linux is, legally, not Unix, and it is released under a license which does not
discriminate based on who you are.

~~~
justin66
Criddell is right about the history, and Xenix was literally not Unix either.
At some point Microsoft agreed to not compete in the "Unix" operating system
market, broadly defined.

An awful lot has changed since then, including Microsoft buying a System V
Unix license when SCO was extorting everyone (including Sun, as I recall) into
doing that. There is so much water under the bridge, I imagine Microsoft could
do it if they wanted to. But why?

I don't see how it's a good idea from their point of view. An ubuntu respin is
about as far as I'd ever expect them to go down that path, and even that seems
like more commitment than they'd want to make.

~~~
Sanddancer
Xenix was a Unix. It started out as based on Unix V 7, then System III, then
System V when MS finally sold it to SCO.

MS tends to keep a lot of fingers in a lot of cakes, even in surprising areas.
Given the number of kernels MS Research has released, it wouldn't be too
terrible of a stretch to see MS release some sort of unix at some point.

~~~
justin66
Wow, thanks. It's been 24 or 25 years since I used Xenix (dammit) and the
funny part is, when I googled a couple of Unix family trees just now, it
didn't even appear on some of them. But you're obviously right.

I think the big thing that would keep MSFT from rolling their own is fear of
antitrust law, in the US and Europe. Less of a concern for them when it comes
to Linux on phones or embedded, I believe.

~~~
mishac
it was actually the _most_ widely used real Unix at one (very dark) point.

~~~
justin66
Interesting thought. I have no problem believing it was running on the largest
number of CPUs. I wonder if it had the largest number of users.

~~~
criddell
[https://books.google.com/books?id=Dz8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA92661&o...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Dz8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA92661&ots=w8lkIroiE2&dq=%22xenix%22&pg=PA92661#v=onepage&q=%22xenix%22&f=false)

From that article:

"according to AT&T, roughly half of the 500,000 Unix licenses are held by
Xenix developers"

~~~
justin66
As I alluded, it's a question of what you're measuring. CPUs, developers, and
users could all vary between versions.

I really am amazed by that figure, though. Wow. And I had forgotten that xenix
ran on some bigger machines, not just pcs.

------
merb
Actually what Microsoft is doing could be breat. However I don't understand
why they even use Jenkins for this project ([https://github.com/Azure/sonic-
build-tools](https://github.com/Azure/sonic-build-tools)) I mean I love
jenkins, but wouldn't it be at least good if they would've used their own
build tool? I mean something like tfs-linux-worker I know that doesn't exists,
but if they would've done something they could've done something good somehow.
Using jenkins feels like "we can't yet do that with our own stuff"

~~~
Someone1234
Because tfs is dying. Why port over tooling for a source management system
that is on it's deathbed? Even Microsoft themselves are moving over to Git for
many products/teams and have added native Git support to both Visual Studio
and VS Online.

PS - Although Microsoft still use Perforce internally also.

~~~
sootzoo
> Because tfs is dying. Why port over tooling for a source management system
> that is on it's deathbed?

[citation needed]

Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and
well. And improvements made to VSO have been shipping regularly as updates to
accompanying TFS on-prem.

Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)? TFVC is
also pretty popular as a Visual SourceSafe replacement and has been very
stable for us, though the recent support of Git in Visual Studio and TFS has
us considering it as an alternate workflow for some smaller projects. I think
the support of Git is great, but knowing MS (and what they've said through
their usual surrogates) I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.

~~~
Someone1234
> Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and
> well.

Visual Studio Online supports Git. So, no, it is not "TFS in the cloud." TFS
and Visual Studio Online are very loosely coupled.

> Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)?

I'm not confusing anything, I just picked one of Microsoft's many acronyms
they use for it. Even Microsoft's own consultants call it "TFS" when talking
about Visual Studio Team Services in Visual Studio Online. So if Microsoft's
own consultants are "wrong" then I am in good company.

> I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.

I do.

It doesn't work very well: it sends way WAY too many files up and down
constantly, it has no concept of a pull request, offline mode sucks,
branching/merging is expensive as all heck (inc. disk space, bandwidth, time,
any metric), and even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github.

I've used both on VS Online, no comparison, and Microsoft's own staff seem to
agree. It is only a matter of "when" not "if" TFS will die and Git will take
its place (although I suspect Perforce will survive on the Windows team within
Microsoft).

There's a reason Git has _taken over the world_.

~~~
sootzoo
Again, you're citing the source control system as the primary feature. TFS is
an entire application lifecycle management suite, not just version control.
You seem to (continue to) ignore this. Its closest analogue is probably the
entire Atlassian family of products.

On TFVC:

> it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly

It sends literally zero files anywhere until you interact with the server, as
any sane server-based version control system would do. I don't know about your
workflow but I don't know what you consider a reasonable amount of I/O to sync
a workspace. You can elect "Local" workspaces since around TFS 2012 which can
work completely disconnected if you choose.

> branching/merging is expensive as all heck

It's folder-based branching and can be done very quickly/cheaply if you don't
store your entire company in source control. And how well does Git handle
large files? Git is opinionated on branches and creates them cheaply/quickly;
TFVC evolved from CVS-type systems where this was not the prevailing mindset,
but again I don't know what you're considering "expensive." Maybe where you
work?

> even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github

Which isn't evidence of anything other than it's their current tool of choice.
That has a lot less to do with future direction of their enterprise products
than you're assuming here.

> Microsoft's own consultants

> Microsoft's internal teams

> the Windows team within Microsoft

Do you have insider info or are you just trying to sound like you do?

~~~
Locke1689
There are definitely some people who prefer to use TFS and some teams (like
.NET) that are heavily invested in Git.

And yes, we call TFVC TFS all the time :)

------
corncobpipe
I'm sure the lawyers at SonicWall will love this

------
ajarmst
On the plus side, that will be the most carefully reviewed, evaluated and
checksummed distro in Linux history.

------
tempodox
Linux has been the best friend of MS Windows for quite some time now. All the
Linux users dual-boot into Windows each time they need some half-decent GUI
for an app or whatever. Linux might be a good server host OS, but it failed
spectacularly to conquer the desktop.

~~~
anthk
My Trisquel setup says otherwise. wmctrl -a + LXDE >>> Any Explorer.exe
version.

------
anonbanker
In other news, there is now a stable Microsoft operating system I could use on
my computer.

If they ported Windows to it, they could probably make a solid Wayland/KDE
competitor.

------
Taniwha
Do I hear the distant shivering of thousands of tiny daemons?

~~~
anonbanker
Not until the FAT patent is freed up. Same old Microsoft until then.

------
chenster
It's probably also the OS that used to run SQL Server on Linux announced this
week - [https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-
sql-s...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-
on-linux/).

~~~
wmf
I doubt Ethernet switches run SQL Server.

~~~
josephcooney
I think ISA server (a firewall, essentially) required SQL Server, so they
tried, they really tried.

~~~
darkr
This is going back a bit, but from memory that was just for "advanced
logging", which was enabled on a default install. You could either not
configure advanced logging, or you could use a remote SQL server.

------
MayMuncher
Anybody have any links to switches/routes that support SAI? I couldn't find
any

~~~
wmf
Mellanox: [https://github.com/Mellanox/SAI-
Implementation](https://github.com/Mellanox/SAI-Implementation)

It looks like Dell is working on it and there are rumors that Microsoft is
_encouraging_ Broadcom to release a SAI driver.

------
qwertyuiop924
Ah, how wonderful it will be to live in a world without embrace and extend.

Wait. systemd, kdbus, GNOME and systemd-udevd. Shit.

We have met the enemy, and befriended it. Now we are the enemy.

~~~
simoncion
Well, the "peanut gallery" [0] pushed back on kdbus back in the 4.1 merge
window and -incredibly- it looks like the devs in charge of kdbus are
redesigning it. (kdbus may or may not now be called bus1... it's not clear at
this point.)

Last I checked, kdbus isn't even being shipped in Fedora latest anymore.

[0] AKA: The engineers in charge of QA and technical critique of major changes
to the Linux kernel.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Thank god. dbus has no business being in the kernel. In fact, Linus said that
the problem was just that dbus was coded poorly, and that it could probably
perform well in userspace. But Greg wanted it in, and Linus trusts Greg...

I mean, honestly. Go look at some of Linus's usenet postings circa 1990-2005.
This is exactly the kind of thing that he said should never, EVER, go into the
kernel.

------
hathym
if you can't beat them join them

------
thescribe
I thought they already did, and it was called RHEL. I guess that's not Debian.

~~~
TallGuyShort
What's the connection between RHEL and Microsoft? Azure seems to have focussed
on Ubuntu first, so I'm not surprised they lean closer to a Debian base.

~~~
dsp1234
RHEL was one of the first 'supported' linux guests for hyper-v [0]

[0] -
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partn...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partnership.html)

------
plugnburn
Finally M$ Linux comes true. So we must prepare to viruses, antiviruses,
"defenders" and other whole infrastructure industry that lives on creating
problems out of nothing and then heroically solving them.

