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Windows 10 on ARM

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Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#131

Post by randyrand »

oridecon wrote: post #127
randyrand wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how shitty it would be to have your phone do the Windows popup "restarting in 4 hours" and then you're forced to be out of a phone for 10-30 minutes. Worse yet if the update fails...

For me it's way shittier to have an insecure phone. I would even install a Clippy launcher on Android if I could have the latest security and feature updates the same day that they are released (without changing phones every year or using custom ROMs).

Those are not the only 2 alternatives. For instance, iOS has neither of these problems.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#132

Post by [deleted] »

fnord123 wrote: post #125

They are doing this because they want the benefits of great ARM battery life. But they are emulating x86 on ARM. So they believe that emulated x86 on ARM will have a better battery life than native x86. The only way I think this could be possible is if they measure battery life of an idle device. Maybe someone can disabuse me of this belief.

[deleted]

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#133

Post by monocasa »

sjmulder wrote: post #84
satysin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses emulation. While it is true the user needs to download a 'game image' rather than play the game directly from disc this is because that image is a virtual hard disk that contains the game and a customised Xbox 360 virtual machine that has tweaks for the game. It is similar to PC console emulators that have specific configs for certain games.

I thought they do a static recompilation too, from the original binary, but I can't look it up now.

That's actually probably the case. Xbox 360 banned making arbitrary pages executable (not even the Kernel could do it, the Hypervisor call to mark a page as executable had to come with the signatures signed by Microsoft's private key).

So they probably can get away with static recompilation.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#136

Post by monocasa »

vvanders wrote: post #117
vardump wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent point. I hope the answer is not "by restricting all emulated threads to one CPU core".

My off-the-cuff guess is they just force a memory/inst fence where x86 makes guarantees which is a bit better but still incurs some overhead. Visual Studio used to(probably still does) this around volatile for x86 which leads to fun bugs when you port to ARM/etc.

That'd basically be putting a barrier on every memory access though.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#137

Post by sjark »

mihular wrote: post #126
0xFFC wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pressured google. That was the point. Google does not give a flying fuck about developer experience. I am not saying that is wrong or right. I am saying this was the case for Google for many years. They just didn't give fuck about the experience. But look at the timing. Everyone was nagging on google for years about slow emulator. They didn't do shit for years. Microsoft released an emulator, which was superior…

It'd make sense if Hyper-V wasn't monopolistic. You can't run both at the same time, or better, no other virtualization host is allowed when Hyper-V is on. Which sucks.

The problem there if I am not mistaken is the CPU Virtualization extensions that can't handle multiple hypervisors using them at the same time.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#138

Post by qb45 »

discreteevent wrote: post #102
bborud wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must kill him inside.

I would think not. It finally showcases the flexibility he put in to the core of NT.

Not that "finally", Windows NT was designed specifically to support POSIX and OS/2 alongside Win32 apps and the first few versions actually shipped it.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#139

Post by tinus_hn »

sjark wrote: post #137
mihular wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd make sense if Hyper-V wasn't monopolistic. You can't run both at the same time, or better, no other virtualization host is allowed when Hyper-V is on. Which sucks.

The problem there if I am not mistaken is the CPU Virtualization extensions that can't handle multiple hypervisors using them at the same time.

That's true but it sure is convenient for Microsoft, and they are exploiting it as far as they can with the Credential Guard feature.

Re: Windows 10 on ARM

#140

Post by tabulatouch »

wand3r wrote: post #35

I am seriously impressed with Microsoft. I haven't used windows in years but they are releasing tons of useful things. VSCode is great on Ubuntu and every version of OS X I have run it on. Plus tons of other cool things like bash on win; etc. Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

I agree, what Microsoft shows us today is a real evolution of a software-engineering empire done (mostly) right. The sad fact is that this open-source love + tons of goodies for developers comes after decades of pain and suffering, which were not really "killing" Microsoft, but they were risking a lot. Now they're flying, leaving Apple far behind (Apple completely lacks a multi-tier engineering vision), but if they get a monopoly again... pain and suffering will be back. That's the free market.
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