Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by nickpsecurity » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 6:32 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #121

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105

Lesson: Microsoft is willing to improve their proprietary offerings using leveraging free software others built. This is the main reason for FOSS uptake everywhere and makes great business sense for them. They also make a killing in patent royalties on the Android ecosystem. If anything, Nadella is focusing Microsoft more on the dollar than prior politics. It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many…

Ah, I can't believe no one has remember up to now how after buying Skype, Microsoft replaced its "volunteer" supernodes with 10,000 boxes running grsecurity Linux: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s... On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or th…

Holy crap, I didn't even know about the Skype event! Thanks for the link. Probably the best and funniest endorsement grsecurity ever had haha. However, I've enjoyed for years calling them on running Hotmail on FreeBSD and what it took them to replace the reliable AS/400 running their business with Windows servers. Funny shit.

Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would have to work to screw up that bad. Microsoft is clearly a natural. Can't wait to see how much mockery (or praise) I have to offer at end of Nadella's reign. Honestly, though, I hope he transforms it operationally like Lipner's SDL did for security. Microsoft Research, in particular, has tons of potential that could inspire new stuff just to compete with whatever they offer. And then we buy the competing, hopefully-OSS stuff. ;)

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

#132

Post by ploxiln » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #15

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…

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.

"C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C?

"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?

I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.

This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?

This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.

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

#133

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

anon4 wrote: post #49

osullivj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Linux has dominated the commodity server space. Look what happened to Sun & Solaris. But what about the desktop? Back in the late 90s there was much talk of how the Linux desktop would take over, KDE vs Gnome etc. IBM and Sun backed Open Office, Andy Herzfeld launched Nautilus. And then it didn't happen. MS still owns the business desktop with Windows & Office. And MS still has a big chunk of the consumer deskto…

People focused on innovating too quickly without building enough stability. Plus, programmers started imagining they could innovate as designers and we have Gnome 3, Unity, etc. All built for a mythical herd of grandmas who run linux, but need it to be user-friendly, in some imagined user-friendly way.

  Plus, programmers started imagining they 
  could innovate as designers and we have 
  Gnome 3, Unity, etc.

I always thought those happened because someone allowed designers to make decisions on the projects? "Usability" I think has been the main driver behind a lot of the problems I have experienced over the last few years.

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

#134

Post by Touche » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

> It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Linux is doing well while BSDs have languished.

You're mistaken if you believe that.

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

#135

Post by scardine » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:11 PM UTC

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…

It is not cancerous, it is just infectious. And not by accident, it is by design.

I used to like GPL, so nobody would "steal" my code adding it to a closed source product. I don't care anymore, just use BSD or other credit-where-credit-is-due license: my code was included in a high profile closed source product? Lots of bragging points and free publicity!

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

#136

Post by pakled_engineer » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

x5n1 wrote: post #34

noir_lord wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

This assumes tomorrow MS doesn't drop a BSD licensed Android clone of their own and clean up in that market.

I thought Facebook was going to die out too then they became defacto telecoms in the developing world through WhatsApp/Internet.Org, and now have a billion users.

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

#137

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:33 PM UTC

trentnelson wrote: post #81

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.

> 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-...…

Thanks for the heads up. It's been a decade since I touched Solaris and Aix.

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

#138

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:37 PM UTC

trentnelson wrote: post #82

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…

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.)

I am aware of it.

Even though I used UNIX a lot on my career, I have always been with foots on both lands and enjoyed Win32 more than POSIX, claimed as portable, but full of nuaces per UNIX clone.

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

#139

Post by knorby » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:41 PM UTC

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…

It is a question of switch control more than anything. They are losing Cisco software, etc... with cheaper Open Compute switches, so they need some means to configure them within Azure; in all respects, that's a benefit to Microsoft. Facebook did the same thing: https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope...

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

#140

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Sep 18, 2015, 7:45 PM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #132

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.

"C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C? "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"? I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high. Thi…

> "C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C?

If one codes as "C with C++ compiler" then no.

If one makes use of the features that fix C unsafety, then yes.

> "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?

Which UNIX clone provides a standard OO ABI, as well as, a shell close to the Xerox PARC user experience?

Taligent failed.