19 ms·

Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

200 points by Jerry2 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s... 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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
werber 11y ago
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.
srisaila 11y ago
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.
acd 11y ago
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_2013.pdf http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...
droithomme 11y ago
> Microsoft has developed its own Linux. No, they haven't.
junto 11y ago
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.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS. There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    "C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C? "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"? I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high. This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-copying-slowed-to-16-5mb-s-playing-local-media-files-w http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows? This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
osullivj 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
osullivj 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
tkubacki 11y ago
now someone suing MS for patent infringement for using Linux - would make me giggle
- biggio 11y ago
  What I was thinking too. Maybe BSD would have suited them better?
kickingvegas 11y ago
So wondering how NT kernel + Interix only would of fared.
merb 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Yes except Microsoft's stewardship of .NET is lacking too.
  - artmageddon 11y ago
    How so?
    - x5n1 11y ago
      What the proper Microsoft technology to make full-featured desktop applications?
ck2 11y ago
And they are partnering with CyanogenMod to get it on their phones/tablets. Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  Certainly seems that way since Nadella took charge, although I'm sure the wheels were already set in motion back in the Ballmer days.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    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.
  - skc 11y ago
    It isn't necessary to "own" a growth market to be successful but having said that, don't discount Office 365 which has already usurped Google's similar offering by all accounts.
drnewman 11y ago
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.
- gaigepr 11y ago
  22. My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04. I remember struggling to get various windows games to work through the use of wine.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history. It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
  - x5n1 11y ago
    They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      Microsoft is not going to die if it doesn't embrace Linux... that said, they are much more open today than a decade and a half ago. .Net Core is making a lot of progress and has respawned interest in C# cross platform. I think a lot of this is in the light of what happened with Oracle v Google. There's also, XBox itself and Azure, which are key points to the future of MS along with Office, which will now grow to other platforms, as it should have some time ago.
mrbig4545 11y ago
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 11y ago
  https://cygwin.com/ https://cygwin.com/
  - snnn 11y ago
    What if you start a java process in cygwin? Path names mess me up.
    - yareally 11y ago
      Not sure about Java, but Scala works fine for me in cygwin after doing this[1][2]. I'd have to have a more detailed example (that I can reproduce myself) of what gets messed up though if it's something beyond that, since I can't remember anymore exactly what else I had to do offhand. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-like-sbt-and-its-console-to-work-under-cygwin-any-way-you-think-i http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-l... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with-sbt-in-cygwin-vista http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with...
    - joosters 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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
w8rbt 11y ago
They should call it Microsoft Linux NT. The NT could stand for 'Network Technology'.
ilitirit 11y ago
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 11y ago
  It looks like that. The spyware from CEO Nadella actively scares away consumers of their Windows and XboxOne products.
nitinics 11y ago
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.
hga 11y ago
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-interface-sai-officially-accepted-by-the-open-compute-project-ocp/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "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 11y ago
  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-open-switching-system-fboss-and-wedge-in-the-open/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope...
- wmf 11y ago
  Yes, the ASIC vendors provide drivers for Linux but not for Windows. MSR ported the Broadcom driver to Windows in the past, but it looks like Azure decided to take the path of least resistance.
pwarner 11y ago
Would this be bad for Arista?

200 points by Jerry2 11y ago

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 11y ago
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-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s... 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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.

werber 11y ago

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.

srisaila 11y ago

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.

acd 11y ago

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_2013.pdf http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...

droithomme 11y ago

> Microsoft has developed its own Linux. No, they haven't.

junto 11y ago

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.

pjmlp 11y ago
As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS. There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  "C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C? "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"? I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high. This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-copying-slowed-to-16-5mb-s-playing-local-media-files-w http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows? This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.

osullivj 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

osullivj 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

tkubacki 11y ago

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

biggio 11y ago
What I was thinking too. Maybe BSD would have suited them better?

kickingvegas 11y ago

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

merb 11y ago

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 11y ago
Yes except Microsoft's stewardship of .NET is lacking too.
- artmageddon 11y ago
  How so?
  - x5n1 11y ago
    What the proper Microsoft technology to make full-featured desktop applications?

ck2 11y ago

And they are partnering with CyanogenMod to get it on their phones/tablets. Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?

SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
Certainly seems that way since Nadella took charge, although I'm sure the wheels were already set in motion back in the Ballmer days.
cbd1984 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  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.
- skc 11y ago
  It isn't necessary to "own" a growth market to be successful but having said that, don't discount Office 365 which has already usurped Google's similar offering by all accounts.

drnewman 11y ago

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.

gaigepr 11y ago
22. My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04. I remember struggling to get various windows games to work through the use of wine.
noir_lord 11y ago
I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history. It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
- x5n1 11y ago
  They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Microsoft is not going to die if it doesn't embrace Linux... that said, they are much more open today than a decade and a half ago. .Net Core is making a lot of progress and has respawned interest in C# cross platform. I think a lot of this is in the light of what happened with Oracle v Google. There's also, XBox itself and Azure, which are key points to the future of MS along with Office, which will now grow to other platforms, as it should have some time ago.

mrbig4545 11y ago

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 11y ago
https://cygwin.com/ https://cygwin.com/
- snnn 11y ago
  What if you start a java process in cygwin? Path names mess me up.
  - yareally 11y ago
    Not sure about Java, but Scala works fine for me in cygwin after doing this[1][2]. I'd have to have a more detailed example (that I can reproduce myself) of what gets messed up though if it's something beyond that, since I can't remember anymore exactly what else I had to do offhand. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-like-sbt-and-its-console-to-work-under-cygwin-any-way-you-think-i http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-l... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with-sbt-in-cygwin-vista http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with...
  - joosters 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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

w8rbt 11y ago

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

ilitirit 11y ago

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 11y ago
It looks like that. The spyware from CEO Nadella actively scares away consumers of their Windows and XboxOne products.

nitinics 11y ago

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.

hga 11y ago

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-interface-sai-officially-accepted-by-the-open-compute-project-ocp/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "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 11y ago
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-open-switching-system-fboss-and-wedge-in-the-open/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope...
wmf 11y ago
Yes, the ASIC vendors provide drivers for Linux but not for Windows. MSR ported the Broadcom driver to Windows in the past, but it looks like Azure decided to take the path of least resistance.

pwarner 11y ago

Would this be bad for Arista?