
Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS - Jerry2
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/microsoft_has_developed_its_own_linux_repeat_microsoft_has_developed_its_own_linux
======
drnewman
Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical
implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the
community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--
more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.

~~~
ChrisArgyle
I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets.
They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s.

They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto
standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of
just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that
any more. They lost too much ground under Ballmer.

Now they're nearly tripping over themselves promoting their cross-platform
tolerance. Run Linux in our cloud! Run our apps on all the platforms!
Sync/connect our apps/devices to any service!

Source: Age 34, started with Linux in '97 (Slackware 3.2)

~~~
cbd1984
For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this
back into the 1990s.

IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll
never actually _beat_ Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they
still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."

Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in
a big way. Remember the TV commercials?

~~~
npsimons
37, started using Linux in '98 (what can I say, late bloomer), but ran OS/2
before that as "rebelling against the M$ hegemony" (plus OS/2 was technically
superior). I still have some of the IBM Linux ads.

I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their
offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run
by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer here to is most
definitely _not_ SV or startups; think old, entrenched organizations that have
no impetus to change or improve. You know, like government orgs. Or
Microsoft).

~~~
dx211
40, started using Linux in '93 or '94\. You're probably old enough to realize
that even though you're kind of in the same casino, those "upper management
idiots" are playing a vastly different game than you or your startup. What
portion of your work, for example, is spent figuring out whether the EU is
going to give you a seven-figure fine for not localizing something, or whether
a vendor from a non-NATO country can troubleshoot a server with a given
client's PII on it, or whether the update you're pushing this week has been
tested to make sure none of the 27 major products that take dependency on it
are going to break? If your only metric is how much chrome the end user
sees...

------
osullivj
People forget that MS used to have it's own Unix in the 80s: Xenix. I ported a
large DEC PDP Fortran codebase to run on Xenix back then - it was far too big
to fit in the 640K DOS limit. Writing the Xenix device driver for the 68000
powered graphics card in the PC was fun.

~~~
amyjess
It's also very likely that if things went just a little differently,
Microsoft's main OS today would probably be Xenix-based.

Microsoft created Xenix because they knew DOS would have a limited future, and
in particular they knew there was a lot of value in running enterprise
software on microcomputers. They also knew costs would go down and performance
would go up over time and that running minicomputer-grade stuff on micros
would become more and more feasible as time goes on.

They made Xenix for a number of microcomputer platforms, typically partnering
with the hardware manufacturers (as is the case with Tandy). For the PC, they
chose to partner with SCO instead for some reason.

Xenix was Microsoft's next-generation operating system, intended to be a
platform for the few high-end customers who wanted to run enterprise software
on PC, with plans to push it across the mid-range and even the low end as PCs
get faster and fast hardware gets cheaper.

And then, it all changed when AT&T got broken up. Suddenly, AT&T was allowed
to commercialize their software, including Unix. And AT&T was very, very much
interested in doing this. The whole thing culminated in System V Release 4,
but that took a few years for AT&T to put it together. In the meantime,
Microsoft thought they'd never be able to compete in the Unix market against
the creators of Unix, so they panicked, sold Xenix to SCO, and began looking
for a partner for their _new_ next-generation operating system.

So Microsoft hooked up with IBM and created OS/2 as their successor to Xenix.
Eventually, however, Microsoft fell out with IBM...

After falling out with IBM, Microsoft decided to do it entirely by themselves,
so they poached a bunch of ex-VMS guys from DEC and created Windows NT. After
a few years serving as an enterprise OS, Microsoft began trickling NT down to
the consumer market, eventually replacing DOS-based Windows entirely with the
launch of Windows XP in 2001.

Just imagine the alternate world where Microsoft didn't get spooked by AT&T
commercializing Unix and instead focused on Xenix, trickled it down to the
consumer market, and ultimately replaced DOS-based Windows with a Windows-
style GUI built on top of Xenix.

~~~
hga
A bit of nuance to part of the story:

IBM previously had told it's legion of "buying IBM won't get you fired" IT
managers that the 286 powered PC-AT was the last PC model they'd have to buy
for a long while (one reason Compaq was the first to come out a 386), and
demanded OS/2 run on it.

Unfortunately, the 286 was seriously crippled for doing this sort of thing, as
I recall, switching segment registers was very expensive. And for those of you
who didn't live through the ugliness of 8086->286 (and 386 and beyond
compatibility modes) programming, these were thoroughly 16 bit computers,
where you had at most 64 KiB segments each of stack, code and data, unless you
switched one of those segment registers to point elsewhere. That was cheap
enough for the vast gain in memory on the 8086/8, and the 286 in its
compatibility mode, but native? That mode did a lot more for you (like, hey,
memory protection!), and Intel when that decision was made and implemented
slowly simply didn't understand how people used their CPUs.

Anyway, Windows 3.0 and on was taking off, no one but stupidly managed Lotus
wanted to program OS/2 Presentation Manager, and prior to in 1988 that DEC
killed off a RISC CPU + new operating system effort in favor of continuing
with VAX/VMS for a while longer. The software people, at least, were in
Bellevue, WA, and many were hired to develop OS/2 3.0, which due to the above
morphed into NT 3.1 (which really was around a 3.x Microsoft quality release
:-).

------
junto
Microsoft are now moving quickly to allow users to run .NET on all platforms.
How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing
in?

Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e.
Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation?

I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the
future of Microsoft and Windows Server.

~~~
buffoon
Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012
R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase.

Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard
to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to
provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell
that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests
that.

Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now
and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification
to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as
it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a
pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware.

Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it
heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who
has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to
Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS.

Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and
coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think
anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers.
It's simply a "me too" move.

As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is
deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang,
microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48
core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of
our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than
an aid to the organisation.

IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places
it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth
as well.

The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to
deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint
etc.

Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some
hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.

~~~
MichaelGG
An even simpler summary: To add SPDY or HTTP/2 support to IIS, you must
upgrade the operating system. I understand why this is (http.sys) but ... wow.
Whereas using nginx I literally add "spdy" to the config and presto, double-
digit% improvement on my site.

~~~
buffoon
Yes exactly that sort of shit is what we have to deal with!

http.sys is a giant fucking turd. That and the whole urlacl thing. Nothing but
pain. They added it because of shitty performance in the NT kernel when
serving HTTP from userspace and it turned into a friction point for the whole
operating system.

~~~
merb
The question is why is the userspace so shitty? Doesn't Microsoft implement
some async things into their kernel? Or stuff like epoll, kqueue, etc..?

~~~
buffoon
NT syscall overhead is immense compared to a Unix derivative. There are layers
galore.

------
ilitirit
Microsoft's foray - I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way - into OS
technologies doesn't surprise me any more.

I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:

> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.

The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the
way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products,
but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course
to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise
me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys
like Cumulus Networks in the market.

~~~
frik
It looks like that. The spyware from CEO Nadella actively scares away
consumers of their Windows and XboxOne products.

------
merb
Sooner or later Microsoft will just build his GUI on Top of Linux and sell
that or sell the support like Redhat. That would mean a lot to the computing
World. When .NET runs on more Devices they could just port more and more
compatibility.

~~~
x5n1
Yes except Microsoft's stewardship of .NET is lacking too.

~~~
artmageddon
How so?

~~~
x5n1
What the proper Microsoft technology to make full-featured desktop
applications?

------
hga
Could come down in part to device driver support:

 _Microsoft 's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but
doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps
the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says
it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom,
Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI
(Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)...._

Per an Azure blog posting yesterday ([http://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-
us/blog/switch-abstraction-interface-sai-officially-accepted-by-the-open-
compute-project-ocp/)): " _As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface
(SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project
(OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs._ "

To my _very_ limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper
application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed
networking.

~~~
knorby
It is a question of switch control more than anything. They are losing Cisco
software, etc... with cheaper Open Compute switches, so they need some means
to configure them within Azure; in all respects, that's a benefit to
Microsoft. Facebook did the same thing:
[https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-
ope...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-open-
switching-system-fboss-and-wedge-in-the-open/)

------
mrbig4545
I'd quite like to see the NT kernel with gnu userland, and unixy virtual
filesystems.

There's no denying the NT kernel is an excellent piece of engineering.

~~~
joosters
[https://cygwin.com/](https://cygwin.com/)

~~~
snnn
What if you start a java process in cygwin? Path names mess me up.

~~~
joosters
Cygwin does not alter the behaviour of _existing_ programs. It is a DLL that
can be compiled into new programs to provide lots of POSIX/Linux
compatibility. It also comes shipped with lots of pre-compiled Linux binaries
of common tools.

If you run your pre-existing JRE, its behaviour won't change. If you run a JRE
compiled with cygwin (I've no idea if they provide one or not) then it will
have UNIX-style path support.

~~~
yareally
Don't believe there is such a JRE. I mostly handle paths like I would normally
on windows and they work ok on the JVM:

"c:/whatever/another_dir/some.file"

There's also cygpath to convert between Windows/Unix style paths:
[http://cygwin-lite.sourceforge.net/html/cygpath.html](http://cygwin-
lite.sourceforge.net/html/cygpath.html)

------
osullivj
I'm not familiar with Mono or any of the .Net on Linux efforts, so forgive my
ignorance. However, having a running .Net stack with a CLR VM and class libs
is not the whole story when it comes to running Windows native server side
stuff. One of the things I've discovered building spreadserve.com is that
there's a lot of COM & Registry plumbing necessary to enable Windows native
desktop binaries to run in a server environment. So I imagine running real
.Net based servers on Linux would require something like Wine to supply ABI
compatible interfaces to the registry and COM services, and lots else beside.
That's a non trivial undertaking. The MS Linux described in the Register story
sounds like it's dedicated to networking tasks. I'd bet there's no .Net
running on it at all.

~~~
buffoon
There is no .Net here AFAIK and if there was it's not a problem. It's software
defined networking that happens to use Linux as a kernel.

As for .Net, ASP.Net 5 runs fine on Linux and OSX without any COM or registry
dependencies. It is entirely platform portable and open source.

------
acd
AFAIK Microsoft uses Mellanox Infiniband networking in Azure. So this Linux
distro is most likely controlling Mellanox hardware. Do you know which
Mellanox model of infiband switches they use?

"InfiniBand enables the most efficient cloud – Microsoft Azure" source:
[http://www.mellanox.com/related-
docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...](http://www.mellanox.com/related-
docs/applications/TOP500_NOV_2013.pdf)

------
nitinics
More than just an OS, I think what they've built is a Network OS (NOS) on top
of Linux. They have been involved in Switch Abstraction Interface(SAI)
specifications from Open Compute Networking Projects from early days. I am
excited what this brings on the table in Software Defined Networking. I really
hope they open source their SAI implementation, and their NOS can be used with
ONIE. So I could get a bare metal switch, install their NOS, and build network
apps for my use-cases.

------
srisaila
I used Windows for a little over a decade, then I discarded it one day when I
suddenly realized that the proprietary OS actually never taught me anything
about computers. Those precious 10 years went to waste. I'm ashamed to say
that I couldn't discover Linux until about 5 years ago.

------
ck2
And they are partnering with CyanogenMod to get it on their phones/tablets.

Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?

~~~
cbd1984
> Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?

They have no choice. Desktop systems aren't a growth market anymore and, so
far, they don't own anywhere else which _is_.

~~~
scholia
They're certainly refocusing but Azure and Office 365 are both growing
rapidly. Of course, they're cannibalizing their own stuff. The interesting
question is the effect on revenues a few years down the line....

Microsoft has also overtaken IBM in annual turnover, having given it a $50
billion/year start. That means it's refocusing from a healthier financial
position, at the moment. It remains to be seen whether Nadella can do as well
as Ballmer, who tripled turnover and doubled profits. That's quite a
challenge.

------
nickpsecurity
Lesson: Microsoft is willing to improve their proprietary offerings using
leveraging free software others built. This is the main reason for FOSS uptake
everywhere and makes great business sense for them. They also make a killing
in patent royalties on the Android ecosystem. If anything, Nadella is focusing
Microsoft more on the dollar than prior politics.

It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many of the same
tricks. All the spyware and schemes in their recent products confirms that.
They shouldn't be trusted. People need to move away from their tech wherever
possible. Except _maybe_ the stuff like this that's built on tech someone can
inspect, fork and/or clone.

~~~
hga
Ah, I can't believe no one has remember up to now how after buying Skype,
Microsoft replaced its "volunteer" supernodes with 10,000 boxes running
grsecurity Linux: [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-
replaces-p2p-s...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-
replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/)

On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the
two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with
IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick
NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the
largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin)
which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Holy crap, I didn't even know about the Skype event! Thanks for the link.
Probably the best and funniest endorsement grsecurity ever had haha. However,
I've enjoyed for years calling them on running Hotmail on FreeBSD and what it
took them to replace the reliable AS/400 running their business with Windows
servers. Funny shit.

Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would
have to work to screw up that bad. Microsoft is clearly a natural. Can't wait
to see how much mockery (or praise) I have to offer at end of Nadella's reign.
Honestly, though, I hope he transforms it operationally like Lipner's SDL did
for security. Microsoft Research, in particular, has tons of potential that
could inspire new stuff just to compete with whatever they offer. And then we
buy the competing, hopefully-OSS stuff. ;)

~~~
hga
Baller's consistent ability to create material losses no doubt had a large
part in his downfall, see also e.g. the Xbox 360 hardware. And Intel is
claiming that Windows desktop screwups are in part costing it a billion
dollars in 1Q15, people aren't upgrading from XP.

Nadella I'm very uncertain about. To the extent he can terminate with extreme
prejudice stack ranking and the poison it has suffused throughout Microsoft,
he'll have much more people capital, including much less internal sabotage
(part of why Kin failed). And he's completely changed how QA is done, although
I don't know if for the better. On the other hand, he doesn't ... "feel" like
the sort of person who can sufficiently directly change the culture for the
better.

We'll see.

Ah, here's a bigger question: can Nedella change the perception of Microsoft's
trustworthiness? That was bad under Gates, became catastrophic and frankly
insane under Ballmer, and after so many have been burned by Microsoft has got
to have an incalculable cost.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That last point is important. Even ignoring security, NSA, etc. there's the
simple point of being a reliable partner. Microsoft has been almost random
with how they're deciding on API's, desktop appearance, and so on. Then,
without consistency from there. The amount they've fought with users over the
damned start menu is probably the perfect case. The kludge I set up for a
relative on Win 8 was ridiculous and whole experience reminded me why I'm on
Linux (& Win7 previously).

Hopefully he turns that around. That alone might help a lot.

------
kickingvegas
So wondering how NT kernel + Interix only would of fared.

------
tkubacki
now someone suing MS for patent infringement for using Linux - would make me
giggle

~~~
biggio
What I was thinking too. Maybe BSD would have suited them better?

------
w8rbt
They should call it Microsoft Linux NT. The NT could stand for 'Network
Technology'.

------
werber
I've been using Linux since 98, when I was 9. I know too well that this isn't
the dawn of the Linux desktop, but it put a huge smile on my face.

------
pwarner
Would this be bad for Arista?

------
droithomme
> Microsoft has developed its own Linux.

No, they haven't.

