7 ms·

Windows Blue under the hood: MinKernel and BaseFS

76 points by snaky 14y ago

ajross 14y ago
FTA, about "MinWin": "A severely stripped down version (almost 20MB) of Windows 7 was able to run a http server" Last I checked a smallish kernel + uclibc/busybox with most applets (an httpd is in that list) is around 8MB or so. Even glibc only adds 2MB or so more if you throw out the locale stuff. Windows is just a different world.
- btown 14y ago
  At the same time, I find this incredibly impressive. That "smallish kernel" wasn't reverse-engineered from a behemoth, and it doesn't need to satisfy the constraint that it needs to be fully compatible with said behemoth. Huge kudos to the Windows team.
  - jkat 14y ago
    Possibly pedantic, but this can't be described as reverse-engineered.
    - btown 14y ago
      You're right, I was being hasty in my post. It's more like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reengineering_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reengineering_(software)
- jmspring 14y ago
  Thing to consider - how many drivers did that stripped down version include? Windows, at the least, still dominates in overall driver/hardware support. From the article, a "smallish kernel + xyz" is hard to compare with what exactly is in "MinWin". I suspect the fact that http://www.c64web.com http://www.c64web.com runs on an unmodified Commodore 64 blows your "smallish kernel" out of the water. My point? You can make assumptions, but you need to know fully what your kernel and other bits include.
  - sethrin 14y ago
    An 8MB linux kernel is not really all that small. These instructions [0] look like they produce a kernel weighing in at about 800kb, without any significant hacking. A web server occupies another couple of MB. The TinyCore Linux distribution [1] will get you a GUI desktop for 12MB. The c64web site runs on Contiki OS, which will actually work on less capable hardware. It's pretty impressive, really.[2] I would be tempted to say that it doesn't really compare to MinWin or Linux, but I'm still busy being amazed by it. I really don't know what you mean by Windows having greater hardware support, I suppose for certain definitions of "windows" and "support" that could be true. Maybe if you count all versions of windows, and restrict your hardware to common CPU archs, and count drivers that aren't built into the kernel. Honestly I have no idea how you'd come up with numbers either way, but my impression was that Linux can be made to run on pretty much any general-purpose CPU. Perhaps you'll provide some data on the matter. [0][pdf] http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literatureNumber=spraah2a&fileType=pdf http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literat... [1] http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html [2] http://www.contiki-os.org/ http://www.contiki-os.org/
    - hp50g 14y ago
      Better x86/x64 support I'd imagine. Despite being a rabid Linux fanboy, I've had way more driver availability issues with Linux over the years than windows. To be honest, windows just pretty much works these days.
    - lttlrck 14y ago
      Linux power management pales in comparison to Windows. As much as a love Linux it pains me to see my notebooks battery life drop from 5 hours to 1.5, and thats with significant tweaking.
      - rbanffy 14y ago
        My cheap Dell v131 goes about 5 hours with minimal tweaking (turn off keyboard backlight, low brightness setting). What kind of machine did you get?
- manojlds 14y ago
  This is more about having the common core across MS platforms than about running a http server.
  - reeses 14y ago
    Absolutely. "MinWin" sounds so appealing people jump to the conclusion that it's running in the Azure farms or in other MSFT data centers. The next logical step from this assumption is that it could be a product. It's almost unfortunate that the term ever leaked out.
    - hp50g 14y ago
      It almost is. Windows 2008 Server Core was a result of this. It doesn't have a GUI. Ita also what they run Azure on.
      - reeses 14y ago
        Server Core does have a GUI as its primary UI. What confuses people is hearing that the interface is a command line. You still have a window (unless you're remote) and a handful of utilities, but they just don't run under the Explorer desktop or include a lot of what you might have come to expect with Windows or Windows Server.
        hp50g 14y ago
        It doesn't ship with half the dependencies that were tangled up which is why minwin exists. Minwin has a GUI too (apparently you can trigger it during boot on win phone 8 :) )
- igravious 14y ago
  There is absolutely no meat in that article. We have no idea about the technical details of what Microsoft has done. All we have is the aspirational witterings of a couple of seasoned industry bloggers. There is no use comparing vague Windows rumours of a not even released product with what Linux has been able to do since its inception. And BaseFS sounds like VFS, the virtual filesystem layer in Linux also - you'd think it was the most novel idea to abstract away common functionality to a shared core, this design pattern is as old as the hills. These pieces of news carry next to no information, it's pointless that this got onto the front page of HN.
  - hp50g 14y ago
    NT has had VFS from day one (volume manager). You just don't get to see it from the UI and win32 abstraction. In fact NT has mounts, a single tree, case sensitivity and no concept of drive letters. sounds a bit unixy doesn't it? I have no idea why they came to these conclusions.
- hp50g 14y ago
  To be honest, windows NT is a whole load more complicated than Linux variants at every level. It's almost a framework for building operating systems upon. NT architecture is actually really super nice - shame about win32 being thrown on top. 20MiB is impressive.
  - reeses 14y ago
    It all started downhill when the GDI was integrated into the kernel.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      At least there's Server Core these days.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  My first exposure to Unix was on an 8 megabyte 68010 multi-user machine with 50+ terminals. I learned C on an IBM PC XT clone running QNX. Claiming doing something useful with a 20 megabyte kernel is extraordinary is, itself, extraordinary naive.
jervisfm 14y ago
The recent articles on ZFS made me wonder if MS had anything planned for Windows. I was curious so I checked and they apparently have ReFS[1] in Windows 8 Server. I think it's separate from the BaseFS referenced here though. ReFS is not likely to be in the client release until the next version of the OS. [1] - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-n...
- wazoox 14y ago
  What I can't fathom is that ReFS drops very useful (and commonly used) features: transactions, sparse files, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.
  - hp50g 14y ago
    Most of these aren't used frequently. I imagine they will make a reappearance in ReFS2 if required
    - gecko 14y ago
      Huh? Sparse files are used extensively by Hyper-V for disk images. You really want them--especially on Windows Server, which is the only platform with ReFS right now. The base Windows install uses symbolic links to unify things like "Documents"/"My Documents" and other key areas, without which legacy programs will not work properly. I cannot comment on other Windows deploys, but I'll add that my team uses symbolic links heavily on NTFS both in development and production, and that the plethora of articles on adding a link command back to PowerShell seems to imply we're not that weird. And at least SQL Server uses NTFS transactions for its magic. Maybe ReFS2 adds these back, but they will absolutely be missed.
      - cnvogel 14y ago
        The article is talking about removing hard links, not soft links.
      - 14y ago
Magenta 14y ago
I for one welcome our new Microsoft upvoting cabal
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Seems like they've been hiring... Lots of young people perceive Microsoft as the underdog in the internet server space and, somehow, think defending Windows will allow them to capitalize on its coming dominance of the server market. BTW, I also notice their downvoting crew did a thorough job with your comment.
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    >Lots of young people perceive Microsoft as the underdog in the internet server space and, somehow, think defending Windows will allow them to capitalize on its coming dominance of the server market. Underdog? Windows Server takes most of the profit in the server OS market, same with Visual Studio in the IDE market, IIS in the web server market, Exchange in the mail server market. And that's competing against free products.
    - sciurus 14y ago
      "Windows Server takes most of the profit... competing against free products." That makes sense, doesn't it?
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      > Underdog? Windows Server takes most of the profit in the server OS market, same with Visual Studio in the IDE market, IIS in the web server market, Exchange in the mail server market. And that's competing against free products. Yet it's conspicuously absent from the servers that run things like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. I wonder how the kids explain why is it so.
      - nivla 14y ago
        >Yet it's conspicuously absent from the servers that run things like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. I wonder how they explain why is it so. Isn't that similar to assuming Ruby, Django and Go is inept because PHP powers Wikipedia, Facebook, Wordpress and millions of other websites and blogs... In business just because X doesn't use it, doesn't mean your product is inferior or making a loss.

76 points by snaky 14y ago

FTA, about "MinWin": "A severely stripped down version (almost 20MB) of Windows 7 was able to run a http server" Last I checked a smallish kernel + uclibc/busybox with most applets (an httpd is in that list) is around 8MB or so. Even glibc only adds 2MB or so more if you throw out the locale stuff. Windows is just a different world.

btown 14y ago
At the same time, I find this incredibly impressive. That "smallish kernel" wasn't reverse-engineered from a behemoth, and it doesn't need to satisfy the constraint that it needs to be fully compatible with said behemoth. Huge kudos to the Windows team.
- jkat 14y ago
  Possibly pedantic, but this can't be described as reverse-engineered.
  - btown 14y ago
    You're right, I was being hasty in my post. It's more like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reengineering_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reengineering_(software)
jmspring 14y ago
Thing to consider - how many drivers did that stripped down version include? Windows, at the least, still dominates in overall driver/hardware support. From the article, a "smallish kernel + xyz" is hard to compare with what exactly is in "MinWin". I suspect the fact that http://www.c64web.com http://www.c64web.com runs on an unmodified Commodore 64 blows your "smallish kernel" out of the water. My point? You can make assumptions, but you need to know fully what your kernel and other bits include.
- sethrin 14y ago
  An 8MB linux kernel is not really all that small. These instructions [0] look like they produce a kernel weighing in at about 800kb, without any significant hacking. A web server occupies another couple of MB. The TinyCore Linux distribution [1] will get you a GUI desktop for 12MB. The c64web site runs on Contiki OS, which will actually work on less capable hardware. It's pretty impressive, really.[2] I would be tempted to say that it doesn't really compare to MinWin or Linux, but I'm still busy being amazed by it. I really don't know what you mean by Windows having greater hardware support, I suppose for certain definitions of "windows" and "support" that could be true. Maybe if you count all versions of windows, and restrict your hardware to common CPU archs, and count drivers that aren't built into the kernel. Honestly I have no idea how you'd come up with numbers either way, but my impression was that Linux can be made to run on pretty much any general-purpose CPU. Perhaps you'll provide some data on the matter. [0][pdf] http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literatureNumber=spraah2a&fileType=pdf http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literat... [1] http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html [2] http://www.contiki-os.org/ http://www.contiki-os.org/
  - hp50g 14y ago
    Better x86/x64 support I'd imagine. Despite being a rabid Linux fanboy, I've had way more driver availability issues with Linux over the years than windows. To be honest, windows just pretty much works these days.
  - lttlrck 14y ago
    Linux power management pales in comparison to Windows. As much as a love Linux it pains me to see my notebooks battery life drop from 5 hours to 1.5, and thats with significant tweaking.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      My cheap Dell v131 goes about 5 hours with minimal tweaking (turn off keyboard backlight, low brightness setting). What kind of machine did you get?
manojlds 14y ago
This is more about having the common core across MS platforms than about running a http server.
- reeses 14y ago
  Absolutely. "MinWin" sounds so appealing people jump to the conclusion that it's running in the Azure farms or in other MSFT data centers. The next logical step from this assumption is that it could be a product. It's almost unfortunate that the term ever leaked out.
  - hp50g 14y ago
    It almost is. Windows 2008 Server Core was a result of this. It doesn't have a GUI. Ita also what they run Azure on.
    - reeses 14y ago
      Server Core does have a GUI as its primary UI. What confuses people is hearing that the interface is a command line. You still have a window (unless you're remote) and a handful of utilities, but they just don't run under the Explorer desktop or include a lot of what you might have come to expect with Windows or Windows Server.
      - hp50g 14y ago
        It doesn't ship with half the dependencies that were tangled up which is why minwin exists. Minwin has a GUI too (apparently you can trigger it during boot on win phone 8 :) )
igravious 14y ago
There is absolutely no meat in that article. We have no idea about the technical details of what Microsoft has done. All we have is the aspirational witterings of a couple of seasoned industry bloggers. There is no use comparing vague Windows rumours of a not even released product with what Linux has been able to do since its inception. And BaseFS sounds like VFS, the virtual filesystem layer in Linux also - you'd think it was the most novel idea to abstract away common functionality to a shared core, this design pattern is as old as the hills. These pieces of news carry next to no information, it's pointless that this got onto the front page of HN.
- hp50g 14y ago
  NT has had VFS from day one (volume manager). You just don't get to see it from the UI and win32 abstraction. In fact NT has mounts, a single tree, case sensitivity and no concept of drive letters. sounds a bit unixy doesn't it? I have no idea why they came to these conclusions.
hp50g 14y ago
To be honest, windows NT is a whole load more complicated than Linux variants at every level. It's almost a framework for building operating systems upon. NT architecture is actually really super nice - shame about win32 being thrown on top. 20MiB is impressive.
- reeses 14y ago
  It all started downhill when the GDI was integrated into the kernel.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    At least there's Server Core these days.
rbanffy 14y ago
My first exposure to Unix was on an 8 megabyte 68010 multi-user machine with 50+ terminals. I learned C on an IBM PC XT clone running QNX. Claiming doing something useful with a 20 megabyte kernel is extraordinary is, itself, extraordinary naive.

jervisfm 14y ago

The recent articles on ZFS made me wonder if MS had anything planned for Windows. I was curious so I checked and they apparently have ReFS[1] in Windows 8 Server. I think it's separate from the BaseFS referenced here though. ReFS is not likely to be in the client release until the next version of the OS. [1] - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-n...

wazoox 14y ago
What I can't fathom is that ReFS drops very useful (and commonly used) features: transactions, sparse files, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.
- hp50g 14y ago
  Most of these aren't used frequently. I imagine they will make a reappearance in ReFS2 if required
  - gecko 14y ago
    Huh? Sparse files are used extensively by Hyper-V for disk images. You really want them--especially on Windows Server, which is the only platform with ReFS right now. The base Windows install uses symbolic links to unify things like "Documents"/"My Documents" and other key areas, without which legacy programs will not work properly. I cannot comment on other Windows deploys, but I'll add that my team uses symbolic links heavily on NTFS both in development and production, and that the plethora of articles on adding a link command back to PowerShell seems to imply we're not that weird. And at least SQL Server uses NTFS transactions for its magic. Maybe ReFS2 adds these back, but they will absolutely be missed.
    - cnvogel 14y ago
      The article is talking about removing hard links, not soft links.
    - 14y ago

Magenta 14y ago

I for one welcome our new Microsoft upvoting cabal

rbanffy 14y ago
Seems like they've been hiring... Lots of young people perceive Microsoft as the underdog in the internet server space and, somehow, think defending Windows will allow them to capitalize on its coming dominance of the server market. BTW, I also notice their downvoting crew did a thorough job with your comment.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >Lots of young people perceive Microsoft as the underdog in the internet server space and, somehow, think defending Windows will allow them to capitalize on its coming dominance of the server market. Underdog? Windows Server takes most of the profit in the server OS market, same with Visual Studio in the IDE market, IIS in the web server market, Exchange in the mail server market. And that's competing against free products.
  - sciurus 14y ago
    "Windows Server takes most of the profit... competing against free products." That makes sense, doesn't it?
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    > Underdog? Windows Server takes most of the profit in the server OS market, same with Visual Studio in the IDE market, IIS in the web server market, Exchange in the mail server market. And that's competing against free products. Yet it's conspicuously absent from the servers that run things like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. I wonder how the kids explain why is it so.
    - nivla 14y ago
      >Yet it's conspicuously absent from the servers that run things like Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. I wonder how they explain why is it so. Isn't that similar to assuming Ruby, Django and Go is inept because PHP powers Wikipedia, Facebook, Wordpress and millions of other websites and blogs... In business just because X doesn't use it, doesn't mean your product is inferior or making a loss.