3 ms·
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn't just bite the bullet and adopt Linux as the kernel for Windows What is to gain? It's not like the Windows kernel is bad
by ygra 11y ago
> I often wonder why Microsoft doesn't just bite the bullet and adopt Linux as the kernel for Windows
What is to gain? It's not like the Windows kernel is bad or useless. You'd have to redo the Windows API on top of a kernel that works very differently. Any gains here are marginal and there's a lot of cost involved.
- stcredzero 11y agoIt's not like the Windows kernel is bad or useless. The NT kernel is pretty darn good, so long as it's not polluted with things that don't belong in it. It shares a lot of heritage with the VAX kernel. A lot of the same people worked on both. If you don't molest it, the NT kernel can (and does) run ultra high reliability things like RAID arrays.
- ryao 11y agoRAID is not very reliable. Here is an example that I tried the other day in MD RAID 1. I made a 2-disk array, zeroed it, wrote a sector of garbage at 1MB into one disk directly, cleared caches, ran a scrub and did not see any warning about the inconsistency. It relies on the drive firmware to verify the low level formatting parity, so things like misdirected writes (which my writing garbage was meant to simulate) go undetected. There are plenty of other problems too, but that is just one example. Anyway, at scale, you can count on RAID to be unreliable. If you want something reliable, use ZFS.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoVAX was the hardware, VMS was one of the OSs that could run on it.