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Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#71

Post by breakingcups »

buffoon wrote: post #11
junto wrote: post #2

Microsoft are now moving quickly to allow users to run .NET on all platforms. How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in? Or are there too many Microsoft server products earning good profits (i.e. Exchange and BizTalk), to make that switch a realistic future expectation? I'm genuinely interested to hear people's opinions on their thoughts of the future of Microsoft and Windows Serv…

Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase. Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexi…

Wow, I'm currently making nearly the exact same switch, albeit on a smaller scale. I'm currently in charge of a lot of old ASP.NET applications but for the new flagship thing we're looking at ASP.NET 5 on Linux on Azure (BizSpark), Go where it makes sense performance-wise or problem-wise and possibly Postgres instead of SQL Server, although I'm not sure on that last bit yet.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#72

Post by pjmlp »

anon4 wrote: post #50
pjmlp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows IO completion ports and the way threads are scheduled are probably only beaten by Solaris and Aix specific APIs. Most FOSS devs never care to learn such APIs and stay with the lowest common denominator that happens to exist in GNU/Linux and *BSD.

Do you think this will change with the popularity of node.js and libuv? That is, people using said capabilities in a cross-platform manner more.

I doubt it. On the enterprise space from our customers, no one cares about them.

It is all about .NET, C++ and additionally the JVM when going outside Windows.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#73

Post by hga »

Could come down in part to device driver support:

Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch)....

Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs."

To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#74

Post by TallGuyShort »

caskance wrote: post #64
DanBC wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS used to really trash open source, with Ballmer calling GPL "cancer". (Although the company pulled back from that extreme). When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it. But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and p…

GPL is cancer, but in a good way.

The more commonly used term is viral, which these days, I think captures the can-be-the-right-choice/can-be-the-wrong-choice nature, while still saying it spreads to most things it touches.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#75

Post by hga »

noir_lord wrote: post #28
drnewman wrote: post #24

Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.

I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history. It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first cl…

Don't forget Halloween Memo X, along with as I remember stuff from GrokLaw, which revealed that Microsoft funneled 86 million to SCO when it was litigating SCO v. The Open Source World.

(Especially bogus because SCO knew in advance they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM), but I doubt Microsoft knew that.)

I'll bet that by itself had consequences.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#76

Post by buffoon »

breakingcups wrote: post #71
buffoon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase. Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexi…

Wow, I'm currently making nearly the exact same switch, albeit on a smaller scale. I'm currently in charge of a lot of old ASP.NET applications but for the new flagship thing we're looking at ASP.NET 5 on Linux on Azure (BizSpark), Go where it makes sense performance-wise or problem-wise and possibly Postgres instead of SQL Server, although I'm not sure on that last bit yet.

The last bit we're doing it because we got financially fucked by the core licensing changes in SQL 2012.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#77

Post by cbd1984 »

ChrisArgyle wrote: post #70
drnewman wrote: post #24

Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.

I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s. They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under…

For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this back into the 1990s.

IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something."

Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the TV commercials?

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#78

Post by cbd1984 »

dalke wrote: post #43
DanBC wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS used to really trash open source, with Ballmer calling GPL "cancer". (Although the company pulled back from that extreme). When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it. But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and p…

The first Unix I ever touched was Microsoft's Xenix. Wikipedia says MS first released Xenix in 1980.

For a while, Xenix was the best-selling Unix under the sun.

(But not the Sun. It ran on commodity 16-bit IBM PCs.)

((I refuse to resist puns. They just flow through me.))

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#79

Post by cbd1984 »

david-given wrote: post #46
pluma wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was even some Unix in Windows itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

...and I perpetrated a horrible hack which let me run unmodified Linux binaries on it. http://lbw.sourceforge.net (Seriously, it's a vile, vile hack, involving dynamically patching running binaries to work round Windows ABI differences and work around seg faults. But it works well enough to run a Debian userland.)

Speaking of vile hacks... has anyone here used Eunice, which allowed people to have a Unix (BSD-flavor) userland on VMS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_%28software%29

Larry mentions it in the perl configuration file:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Configure

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#80

Post by wmf »

hga wrote: post #73

Could come down in part to device driver support: Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI…

Yes, the ASIC vendors provide drivers for Linux but not for Windows. MSR ported the Broadcom driver to Windows in the past, but it looks like Azure decided to take the path of least resistance.
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