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Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

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Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#171

Post by rurban »

Santosh83 wrote: post #166
vbezhenar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any particular reason why Linux IO is dramatically faster? NTFS is polished FS, Fat32 is extremely simple (may be unreliable but that's not the point) and both should be performant enough. Also there's new ReFS. May be there's some stupid bug like Windows Defender checking file for viruses every write() call which could be easily fixed?

I read previously on HN that it has something to do with NTFS's MFT structures... particularly when large number of small files are involved. I don't think FAT32 suffers from the same problem but then again, it isn't widely used on desktops or servers any more.

It's certainly also ACL overkill. They lookup ACL inheritance by default on every single file call, unless you turn it off in your directory. That's uncached and recursive up to the root, extremely slow.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#173

Post by slededit »

Joeri wrote: post #157
geofft wrote: post #15

> In addition, for several years now, Microsoft's WSL developers have been working on mapping Linux API calls to Windows and vice-versa. A lot of the work needed for Windows apps to run without modification on Linux has already been done. This argument makes little sense: that "vice versa" is wholly unsubstantiated and without it the rest collapses. Making Linux binaries work on NT (which already has a subsystem conc…

On the other hand, Microsoft has been trying for years to get developers off win32 and onto .NET. Windows S mode was an experiment where they didn't support win32 at all. Much of .NET is already open source. One could argue they are ready to make a .NET shell around a linux kernel and ship MS Linux. But ... why would they? The only reasoning I can see is if they could stop maintaining the windows kernel, like how the…

winRT (or whatever it’s called now) is not .NET. It’s based upon COM and has full support for native code. .NET is designed with native COM support so it’s use is seamless there.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#174

Post by ryuuchin »

geofft wrote: post #163
jcelerier wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complexity of kernel calls is much higher when custom memory and scheduler involved I'd say I really don't think so. MS used to render scrollbars in the kernel (was still the case in early Win10 versions)

I believe TrueType fonts are still rendered in kernel mode. (They have a policy option for blocking untrusted fonts, because of course that parser has bugs.)

Although the rendering may still be done in kernel mode the parsing is now done in a usermode sandbox[1] which significantly reduces risks from handling untrusted fonts.

[1] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/secguide/2017/06/15/drop...

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#175

Post by gcbw2 »

jrs95 wrote: post #33
gcbw2 wrote: post #26

No. They just plan to use developer tools (chrome based browser + vstudio) to push their one-push-publish-to-cloud. embrace (chromium), extend (dev tool features that will only work with vsStudio but is awesome), extinguish (tool now only work with vsstudio when serving from azure because they are moving faster than open standards.)

I don't think this is happening, Visual Studio is basically a legacy product at this point. Still developed and maintained, but not a major focus for MS, and they want to push Azure adoption as much as possible so I don't think we'll see IDE lock in like you're talking about.

What do you mean? VS is literally the only Microsoft product that shows up here on HN every other week!

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#176

Post by NelsonMinar »

wscott wrote: post #126
NelsonMinar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the article is just plain wrong about WSL being relevant here. WSL is running Linux binaries on an NT kernel. This article wants to run Win32 binaries on a Linux kernel. Totally different problems. I like WSL, but it's not part of the solution here. (Also WSL's IO performance problems suggest this kind of emulation approach has significant costs.)

I totally agree with your conclusion but I wanted to comment about the IO performance remark. If you take an IO-heavy application and compile it natively on both platforms you will find that IO performance on Linux is dramaticly faster than windows(1) (and OSX for that matter). For certain workloads, I could see a Windows application running faster under emulation on Linux than natively. 1) This is maybe not true for…

Thanks for that info! It seems particularly noticeable in WSL when compiling large packages; all the dependency calculations are super slow compared to native Linux. I'd naively thought it had something to do with Windows Defender overhead but your explanation makes more sense.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#177

Post by Vogtinator »

h1d wrote: post #22
paxys wrote: post #8

The most realistic path to this would be them buying Canonical. I doubt they are going to roll their own distro from scratch.

If 2 of the biggest Linux distributors get owned by giants with their intention of trying to save themselves than save the market is going to be a bad ride. What other commercially supported option do we have for those concerned?

SUSE?

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#178

Post by pritambaral »

jchw wrote: post #107
pritambaral wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty sure Linux kernel modules can't easily do that. They can, and rootkits in the past (unsurprisingly) have. But that's just technical ability; users willing to run things like that is a whole different matter, especially when we can just namespace and/or sandbox apps.

I'm not so surprised that rootkits can exist on Linux, but I was under the impression the Linux kernel made it much harder to break out of the framework provided and patch over whatever you wanted. Sure, it's all Ring 0, but there's kASLR and you have limited visibility, maybe not even a map of symbols. Is it still possible to do this kind of attack today?

Everything running in kernel-space is fully trusted (talking about code compiled and linked against the kernel, not JITted code running in a VM). Symbol map may or may not be built and/or exported during build (both defaulting to true on Debian/Ubuntu setups).

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#179

Post by qwerty456127 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #73
qwerty456127 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but no actual “why” Because in every other aspect but the very kernel (and the UI perhaps) Windows is a disaster. Windows Update especially.

So how does replacing the kernel help with that?

It doesn't. Replacing the kernel doesn't but deprecating the entire OS and switching to GNU/Linux + Wine (which means MS would start contributing to Wine) does. If this happens we can get heavily improved Wine + vendors like Adobe releasing Linux-native versions of their apps.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#180

Post by monocasa »

pjmlp wrote: post #132
monocasa wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true of Solaris too, and they managed to work through that.

With heavy consequences for Sun's viability.

Citation needed that opening Solaris had anything to do with Sun getting sold off.
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