3 ms·

> "why not make an operating system that has only 45 syscalls?" Because much of Microsoft's licensing revenue is contingent upon continuing to support the edge

by roc 12y ago

> "why not make an operating system that has only 45 syscalls?" Because much of Microsoft's licensing revenue is contingent upon continuing to support the edge cases that are inevitably not part of the set of programs that can be dropped into such a sandbox without problems.

pinkyand 12y ago
There's a leak[1] talking about windows 9 possible being partly free, but some features are subscription based. That would give them the incentive to solve the security issues. [1]http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/the-inevitable-arrival-of-subscription-based-windows/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/the-in...
Sanddancer 12y ago
You missed the joke. NT was originally a pretty hardcore microkernel, with even things like graphics drivers being in userspace. However, in the name of performance, more and more stuff was brought into kernel space.
- lobster_johnson 12y ago
  NT was never a true microkernel (much less a hardcore one), and was never intended to be. It was never designed to have any protection between its internal "subsystems" (file system I/O, security, HAL, drivers, etc.) — everything runs in kernel mode, in the same address space, and communicates using direct calls, not IPC. NT is sometimes mistaken for a microkernel partly because of the graphics driver problem, and partly because it contains a module which Microsoft actually refers to as "the microkernel". This part consists mostly of the scheduler. What is true about the NT kernel is that it's modular, with strict internal API separation between each subsystem, and that kind of design was (as far as I know) inspired by actual microkernels, as was the idea of hiding the kernel behind "OS personalities" such as Win32.
  - StillBored 12y ago
    IRPs are the kernel "IPC" mechanism used by NT... And for whole classes of drivers/subsystems IRPs are the core processing mechanism. The IO manager calls to process IRPs could very well be traditional microkernel message passing API's complete with task switching and message copies. While NT is not a microkernel, from a kernel API level it appears to basically be one, only missing the fact that everything is not actually isolated.

by roc 12y ago

pinkyand 12y ago

There's a leak[1] talking about windows 9 possible being partly free, but some features are subscription based. That would give them the incentive to solve the security issues. [1]http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/the-inevitable-arrival-of-subscription-based-windows/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/the-in...

Sanddancer 12y ago

You missed the joke. NT was originally a pretty hardcore microkernel, with even things like graphics drivers being in userspace. However, in the name of performance, more and more stuff was brought into kernel space.

lobster_johnson 12y ago
NT was never a true microkernel (much less a hardcore one), and was never intended to be. It was never designed to have any protection between its internal "subsystems" (file system I/O, security, HAL, drivers, etc.) — everything runs in kernel mode, in the same address space, and communicates using direct calls, not IPC. NT is sometimes mistaken for a microkernel partly because of the graphics driver problem, and partly because it contains a module which Microsoft actually refers to as "the microkernel". This part consists mostly of the scheduler. What is true about the NT kernel is that it's modular, with strict internal API separation between each subsystem, and that kind of design was (as far as I know) inspired by actual microkernels, as was the idea of hiding the kernel behind "OS personalities" such as Win32.
- StillBored 12y ago
  IRPs are the kernel "IPC" mechanism used by NT... And for whole classes of drivers/subsystems IRPs are the core processing mechanism. The IO manager calls to process IRPs could very well be traditional microkernel message passing API's complete with task switching and message copies. While NT is not a microkernel, from a kernel API level it appears to basically be one, only missing the fact that everything is not actually isolated.