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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

#41

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

An even simpler summary: To add SPDY or HTTP/2 support to IIS, you must upgrade the operating system. I understand why this is (http.sys) but ... wow. Whereas using nginx I literally add "spdy" to the config and presto, double-digit% improvement on my site.

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

#42

Post by realusername »

osullivj wrote: post #30
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.

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…

Yes for sure but the desktop itself is not the end of the game anymore, yes Microsoft still owns the desktop but on mobile and tablets, it's another story.

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

#43

Post by dalke »

DanBC wrote: post #38
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…

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.

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

#44

Post by buffoon »

x5n1 wrote: post #36
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…

Which begs the question which CIO made that technology choice? He should be fired!

12 years ago it made sense. It's all legacy now.

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

#45

Post by buffoon »

MichaelGG wrote: post #41
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…

An even simpler summary: To add SPDY or HTTP/2 support to IIS, you must upgrade the operating system. I understand why this is (http.sys) but ... wow. Whereas using nginx I literally add "spdy" to the config and presto, double-digit% improvement on my site.

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.

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

#46

Post by david-given »

pluma wrote: post #18
osullivj wrote: post #3

People forget that MS used to have it's own Unix in the 80s: Xenix. I ported a large DEC PDP Fortran codebase to run on Xenix back then - it was far too big to fit in the 640K DOS limit. Writing the Xenix device driver for the 68000 powered graphics card in the PC was fun.

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.)

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

#47

Post by Kurtz79 »

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…

"How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in ?"

Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.

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

#48

Post by david-given »

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 difficult to install; and its an old old-school Unix, so it's missing a lot of the modern system calls and libraries that make Unixes nice. (I don't even know if win10 supports it.)

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

#49

Post by anon4 »

osullivj wrote: post #30
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.

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.

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

#50

Post by anon4 »

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.

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.
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