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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

#81

Post by trentnelson »

pjmlp wrote: post #26
osullivj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first saw a whole stack of low latency C++ Win32 based servers running on Windows supporting an interest rate trading business back in 2004 I was amazed. Talarian SmartSockets was used for interprocess pub/sub between servers. There was no COM. No thread pools, just a handful of threads in each process executing distinct code. Very clean async design. Back then Linux didn't have lightweight threads, IIRC. I th…

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.

> are probably only beaten by Solaris and Aix specific APIs.

They're definitely not. AIX copied the IOCP interface almost verbatim, but missed one critical piece: associating an IOCP with a desired concurrency level. Solaris added event ports, but again, they missed the concurrency link too.

The root of the problem on UNIX is the readiness I/O model.

See https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-... for more info.

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

#82

Post by trentnelson »

osullivj wrote: post #19
pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS. There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.

When I first saw a whole stack of low latency C++ Win32 based servers running on Windows supporting an interest rate trading business back in 2004 I was amazed. Talarian SmartSockets was used for interprocess pub/sub between servers. There was no COM. No thread pools, just a handful of threads in each process executing distinct code. Very clean async design. Back then Linux didn't have lightweight threads, IIRC. I th…

You should see what you can do today with Registered I/O and the new threadpool APIs. It is phenomenal. (And literally decades ahead of anything UNIX offers. OS X comes close with GCD.)

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

#83

Post by npsimons »

cbd1984 wrote: post #77
ChrisArgyle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

37, started using Linux in '98 (what can I say, late bloomer), but ran OS/2 before that as "rebelling against the M$ hegemony" (plus OS/2 was technically superior). I still have some of the IBM Linux ads.

I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer here to is most definitely not SV or startups; think old, entrenched organizations that have no impetus to change or improve. You know, like government orgs. Or Microsoft).

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

#85

Post by npsimons »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #52
x5n1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.

> Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux. FWIW, I remember people saying this in 1999 as well...

The IBM comparison is really apt. IBM hasn't died, they used to dominate like Microsoft, with all the same underhanded tactics, and they eventually came around.

There's also the "culture wars" to consider, where many (myself included) revered IBM for superior alternatives (OS/2), while old timers would just shake their head at anyone trusting them. Now, I shake my head at anyone trusting Microsoft, although they've tamped down their rabid attacks on open source and Linux, and they do offer some things that aren't complete garbage.

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

#86

Post by yareally »

snnn wrote: post #40
joosters wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://cygwin.com/

What if you start a java process in cygwin? Path names mess me up.

Not sure about Java, but Scala works fine for me in cygwin after doing this[1][2]. I'd have to have a more detailed example (that I can reproduce myself) of what gets messed up though if it's something beyond that, since I can't remember anymore exactly what else I had to do offhand.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124689/i-really-would-l...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4468967/two-problems-with...

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

#87

Post by Aldo_MX »

debacle wrote: post #60
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 GPL is a cancerous license, and Ballmer had to trash open source. That was their business model and they were using the OSS association against Novell. Edit: For those of you downmodding me for saying that the GPL is a cancerous license, please understand that this isn't a negative connotation - it's simply an aspect of the requirements of the license. It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Li…

The GPL is not a cancerous license, if I would use a negative adjective to describe it, it would be: misused.

I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...

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

#88

Post by cbd1984 »

ck2 wrote: post #21

And they are partnering with CyanogenMod to get it on their phones/tablets. Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?

> Is Microsoft doing an IBM-like refocusing?

They have no choice. Desktop systems aren't a growth market anymore and, so far, they don't own anywhere else which is.

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

#89

Post by avian »

david-given wrote: post #48
mrbig4545 wrote: post #27

I'd quite like to see the NT kernel with gnu userland, and unixy virtual filesystems. There's no denying the NT kernel is an excellent piece of engineering.

Interix. Microsoft's Unix. It runs on the NT kernel alongside win32 as another process personality. Most windowses come with the Interix core, and you can get the userland part from Microsoft --- it's called Services For Unix these days, I think. It even comes with GCC. It's a pretty nice piece of work, behaving just like an old school Unix. But it's largely been abandoned by Microsoft and is buggy as hell and diffic…

Interesting. I didn't know they had a replacement after they dumped the POSIX kernel personality in Windows XP.

Wikipedia says that "Interix will not be included in Windows versions after Windows 8" though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

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

#90

Post by Skunkleton »

merb wrote: post #51
buffoon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly that sort of shit is what we have to deal with! http.sys is a giant fucking turd. That and the whole urlacl thing. Nothing but pain. They added it because of shitty performance in the NT kernel when serving HTTP from userspace and it turned into a friction point for the whole operating system.

The question is why is the userspace so shitty? Doesn't Microsoft implement some async things into their kernel? Or stuff like epoll, kqueue, etc..?

I am not an NT guy so maybe this is off, but doesn't windows support overlapped IO? To my understanding it is a socket only version of epoll.
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