14 ms·

Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux

324 points by l1n 11y ago

Someone1234 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > it used to speculate that the supposed linux distro would be MIT licensed. Not even Microsoft could pull that one off. > ...There are several things I don't like about this article. It reads like an April Fool's Joke circa 1996, you mean?
  - chadzawistowski 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        What does that actually mean, though? It can't affect the software being distributed. Is it only the distro tools themselves?
        cyphar 11y ago
        The actual collection of software called the distribution. That's what is being licensed.
        pjc50 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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).
      - chei0aiV 11y ago
        Where did you read Debian switched to MIT?
- kijiki 11y ago
  Microsoft isn't a huge Debian fan, they just chose it because our (Cumulus) distribution is based on Debian, and so our patches are against it. Porting them to another distribution would be work.
corncobpipe 11y ago
I'm sure the lawyers at SonicWall will love this
merb 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    > 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 11y ago
      > 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.
mankash666 11y ago
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)
- untog 11y ago
  > 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) They do, and it isn't always the wrong choice. If you know the OS inside out it's better to use that than a brand new one you don't know the sharp edges of yet.
- iheredia 11y ago
  Which tool is the best for a task is not always the major factor. Other things like the developer team experience with the tools, the community support and the planned deadlines sometimes makes the decision a little harder. If the ms teams are already familiar with tweaking linux distros to their needs, then it seems like a good choise
- geographomics 11y ago
  In what ways is the BSD networking stack superior?
  - bladerunner82 11y ago
    Throughput. The BSD networking stack has been very carefully engineered over time. Linux is OK, but nowhere near as robust. FreeBSD is legendary for load tolerance and network throughput, that on equal machines would choke a Linux server. Seen it, work(ed) with it. When we do something serious that requires heavy load and awesome throughput, we always lean on FreeBSD, never anything else. Everything else has always let us down.
    - mixmastamyk 11y ago
      That was as true ten years ago, is it still? Have there been any recent benchmarks?
thescribe 11y ago
I thought they already did, and it was called RHEL. I guess that's not Debian.
- TallGuyShort 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    RHEL was one of the first 'supported' linux guests for hyper-v [0] [0] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partnership.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partn...
thescribe 11y ago
I thought they already did, and it was called RHEL.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
Life imitates (comedic) art ... http://www.mslinux.org/ http://www.mslinux.org/
- ericzawo 11y ago
  My first thought too! Somebody check the temperature in hell.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Lots of opportunities for snowballs it seems.
- noam87 11y ago
  My tweet just two days ago: https://twitter.com/87noam/status/706963428414455812 https://twitter.com/87noam/status/706963428414455812
godgod 11y ago
The new title being kicked around. NSALINUX.
cpeterso 11y ago
They should call it XENIX. :)
- hoodoof 11y ago
  You must be old.
  - rbanffy 11y ago
    It's still the finest OS Microsoft ever shipped. ;-)
    - hoodoof 11y ago
      I seem to recall Xenix ran on an 80286. Speaking of which, did anyone ever end up apologising for the 80286?
      - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
        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_ 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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.
criddell 11y ago
I always thought that Microsoft was blocked from getting into Linux by the terms of their sale of Xenix.
- cpayne 11y ago
  In 2012, Microsoft was a significant contributor to Linux[1]. This was mostly because of Hyper-V. So, if/when it suits them, Microsoft are all over Linux [1]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/linux_foundation_kernel_report_2013/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/linux_foundation_ker...
- cbd1984 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
chris_wot 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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."
caf 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Sounds like the Cumulus Linux approach (they use some daemon called switchd iirc)
  - kijiki 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Agreed - it's good to be cautious - but, Microsoft's approach toward E/E/E was rational (if slightly evil), when they were trying to control the platform. But now, they are trying to control the service/data, in which case the cloud-API (theirs, preferably) is what they want everyone to buy into. In that model, they deploy completely proprietary service interfaces (similar to what Amazon does with AWS, stripe with their API, etc..) - but at the same time, they want to have 100% support of all platforms - particularly in the mobile world where they have round-off presence. Net-Net, It's entirely rational for a profit-maximizing Microsoft (of 2016, at least) to play nice with all alternative client platforms. I believe Satya Nadella's Microsoft is going to be a very difference animal than the Balmer/Gates Microsoft. I guess we'll see over the next 5 years, but it looks positive so far.
    - Piskvorrr 11y ago
      Oh, we're already seeing ahemSkypeahem. Is that not MS? Is that not Linux? Is that not seriously user-hostile? (Ohbutthat'ssomethingcompletelydifferent. Right?)
      - tallanvor 11y ago
        Not really. I'd say it's more that Skype on Linux isn't a priority for them. They have it on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS... And if you think it's user-hostile for MS to not continue development of Skype on Linux, don't you have to agree that Instagram, Snapchat, and all the other app developers that don't release apps for Windows Phone are user-hostile as well?
qwertyuiop924 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  I know you're being downvoted, but I spent the better part of today dealing with a Linux Mint Debian Edition (Jessie) install that decided to install systemd in an update. the original install had no systemd. I explicitly installed sysvinit in order to purge it fully. Today's apt-get dist-upgrade (and reboot to newer kernel) brought me this unwelcome surprise. Therefore, I made today the day I officially switched my last debian system over to Devuan[0], which was easier than I imagined. No more systemd, or packages depending on it. 0. https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/
ajarmst 11y ago
On the plus side, that will be the most carefully reviewed, evaluated and checksummed distro in Linux history.
chenster 11y ago
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-server-on-linux/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-s....
- wmf 11y ago
  I doubt Ethernet switches run SQL Server.
  - josephcooney 11y ago
    I think ISA server (a firewall, essentially) required SQL Server, so they tried, they really tried.
    - darkr 11y ago
      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.
    - krylon 11y ago
      Except that ISA server ran on regular PC/server hardware. There is a big difference between a firewall/proxy and an ethernet switch.
MayMuncher 11y ago
Anybody have any links to switches/routes that support SAI? I couldn't find any
- wmf 11y ago
  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.
plugnburn 11y ago
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.
Taniwha 11y ago
Do I hear the distant shivering of thousands of tiny daemons?
- anonbanker 11y ago
  Not until the FAT patent is freed up. Same old Microsoft until then.
hathym 11y ago
if you can't beat them join them
exabrial 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
    - anonbanker 11y ago
      I don't know about unix, but maybe we can all agree that Windows under the hood is very systemd-like.
    - csixty4 11y ago
      > 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-Generation-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B00J5X5E9U/ref=sr_1_2 http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generati...
tempodox 11y ago
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 11y ago
  My Trisquel setup says otherwise. wmctrl -a + LXDE >>> Any Explorer.exe version.
coldtea 11y ago
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
anonbanker 11y ago
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.

324 points by l1n 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > it used to speculate that the supposed linux distro would be MIT licensed. Not even Microsoft could pull that one off. > ...There are several things I don't like about this article. It reads like an April Fool's Joke circa 1996, you mean?
- chadzawistowski 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      What does that actually mean, though? It can't affect the software being distributed. Is it only the distro tools themselves?
      - cyphar 11y ago
        The actual collection of software called the distribution. That's what is being licensed.
        pjc50 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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).
    - chei0aiV 11y ago
      Where did you read Debian switched to MIT?
kijiki 11y ago
Microsoft isn't a huge Debian fan, they just chose it because our (Cumulus) distribution is based on Debian, and so our patches are against it. Porting them to another distribution would be work.

corncobpipe 11y ago

I'm sure the lawyers at SonicWall will love this

merb 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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 11y ago
    > 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.

mankash666 11y ago

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)

untog 11y ago
> 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) They do, and it isn't always the wrong choice. If you know the OS inside out it's better to use that than a brand new one you don't know the sharp edges of yet.
iheredia 11y ago
Which tool is the best for a task is not always the major factor. Other things like the developer team experience with the tools, the community support and the planned deadlines sometimes makes the decision a little harder. If the ms teams are already familiar with tweaking linux distros to their needs, then it seems like a good choise
geographomics 11y ago
In what ways is the BSD networking stack superior?
- bladerunner82 11y ago
  Throughput. The BSD networking stack has been very carefully engineered over time. Linux is OK, but nowhere near as robust. FreeBSD is legendary for load tolerance and network throughput, that on equal machines would choke a Linux server. Seen it, work(ed) with it. When we do something serious that requires heavy load and awesome throughput, we always lean on FreeBSD, never anything else. Everything else has always let us down.
  - mixmastamyk 11y ago
    That was as true ten years ago, is it still? Have there been any recent benchmarks?

thescribe 11y ago

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

TallGuyShort 11y ago
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 11y ago
  RHEL was one of the first 'supported' linux guests for hyper-v [0] [0] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partnership.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partn...

thescribe 11y ago

I thought they already did, and it was called RHEL.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

Life imitates (comedic) art ... http://www.mslinux.org/ http://www.mslinux.org/

ericzawo 11y ago
My first thought too! Somebody check the temperature in hell.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Lots of opportunities for snowballs it seems.
noam87 11y ago
My tweet just two days ago: https://twitter.com/87noam/status/706963428414455812 https://twitter.com/87noam/status/706963428414455812

godgod 11y ago

The new title being kicked around. NSALINUX.

cpeterso 11y ago

They should call it XENIX. :)

hoodoof 11y ago
You must be old.
- rbanffy 11y ago
  It's still the finest OS Microsoft ever shipped. ;-)
  - hoodoof 11y ago
    I seem to recall Xenix ran on an 80286. Speaking of which, did anyone ever end up apologising for the 80286?
    - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
      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_ 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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.

criddell 11y ago

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

cpayne 11y ago
In 2012, Microsoft was a significant contributor to Linux[1]. This was mostly because of Hyper-V. So, if/when it suits them, Microsoft are all over Linux [1]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/linux_foundation_kernel_report_2013/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/linux_foundation_ker...
cbd1984 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

chris_wot 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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."

caf 11y ago

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 11y ago
Sounds like the Cumulus Linux approach (they use some daemon called switchd iirc)
- kijiki 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  Agreed - it's good to be cautious - but, Microsoft's approach toward E/E/E was rational (if slightly evil), when they were trying to control the platform. But now, they are trying to control the service/data, in which case the cloud-API (theirs, preferably) is what they want everyone to buy into. In that model, they deploy completely proprietary service interfaces (similar to what Amazon does with AWS, stripe with their API, etc..) - but at the same time, they want to have 100% support of all platforms - particularly in the mobile world where they have round-off presence. Net-Net, It's entirely rational for a profit-maximizing Microsoft (of 2016, at least) to play nice with all alternative client platforms. I believe Satya Nadella's Microsoft is going to be a very difference animal than the Balmer/Gates Microsoft. I guess we'll see over the next 5 years, but it looks positive so far.
  - Piskvorrr 11y ago
    Oh, we're already seeing ahemSkypeahem. Is that not MS? Is that not Linux? Is that not seriously user-hostile? (Ohbutthat'ssomethingcompletelydifferent. Right?)
    - tallanvor 11y ago
      Not really. I'd say it's more that Skype on Linux isn't a priority for them. They have it on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS... And if you think it's user-hostile for MS to not continue development of Skype on Linux, don't you have to agree that Instagram, Snapchat, and all the other app developers that don't release apps for Windows Phone are user-hostile as well?

qwertyuiop924 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
anonbanker 11y ago
I know you're being downvoted, but I spent the better part of today dealing with a Linux Mint Debian Edition (Jessie) install that decided to install systemd in an update. the original install had no systemd. I explicitly installed sysvinit in order to purge it fully. Today's apt-get dist-upgrade (and reboot to newer kernel) brought me this unwelcome surprise. Therefore, I made today the day I officially switched my last debian system over to Devuan[0], which was easier than I imagined. No more systemd, or packages depending on it. 0. https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/

ajarmst 11y ago

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

chenster 11y ago

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-server-on-linux/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-s....

wmf 11y ago
I doubt Ethernet switches run SQL Server.
- josephcooney 11y ago
  I think ISA server (a firewall, essentially) required SQL Server, so they tried, they really tried.
  - darkr 11y ago
    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.
  - krylon 11y ago
    Except that ISA server ran on regular PC/server hardware. There is a big difference between a firewall/proxy and an ethernet switch.

MayMuncher 11y ago

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

wmf 11y ago
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.

plugnburn 11y ago

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.

Taniwha 11y ago

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

anonbanker 11y ago
Not until the FAT patent is freed up. Same old Microsoft until then.

hathym 11y ago

if you can't beat them join them

exabrial 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    I don't know about unix, but maybe we can all agree that Windows under the hood is very systemd-like.
  - csixty4 11y ago
    > 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-Generation-Microsoft-ebook/dp/B00J5X5E9U/ref=sr_1_2 http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generati...

tempodox 11y ago

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 11y ago
My Trisquel setup says otherwise. wmctrl -a + LXDE >>> Any Explorer.exe version.

coldtea 11y ago

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

anonbanker 11y ago

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.