4 ms·
A lot of modern Windows kernel API looks exceedingly familiar to Unix. I would think perhaps early Windows was close to VMS, but as they tried to bolt on a POSI
by snagglegaggle 7y ago
A lot of modern Windows kernel API looks exceedingly familiar to Unix. I would think perhaps early Windows was close to VMS, but as they tried to bolt on a POSIX layer it seems it has drifted.
Features of VMS like transparent clustering are missing, for example.
- abotsis 7y agoWhich api’s specifically? VMS was always (and still is?) posix compliant, as was nt. VMS even ran x11!
- wbl 7y agoThe I/O model in the kernel is very similar and utterly unlike Unix.
- snagglegaggle 7y agoAs you move up the stack it looks more Unixy. The core is VMS-like and I can see the similarity, but it seems to me the majority of the code actually written exists in a middleware layer that is maybe not as far from VMS as Linux, but not quite VMS. Names can be quite different. I remember looking at the disk stack and thinking it looked quite similar, save for completion ports.
- wbl 7y agoSoftirq and taskqueue change the model to be more VMS like.
- pjmlp 7y agoWindow kernel APIs have nothing UNIX like beyond sockets. POSIX personality was the place for them. Modern Windows follows mainframe's footsteps by providing UNIX compatibility via a VM environment.