Obligatory Joke [LWN.net]

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 6, 2025 17:55 UTC (Mon) by tesarik (subscriber, #52705)
In reply to: Obligatory Joke by gmprice
Parent article: Some things to expect in 2025

That's wrong. The next step is Linux Subsystem for Windows, which will present native Windows desktop on a Linux kernel. Micosoft can then finally cut their R&D costs by maintaining only one kernel instead of two…

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Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 10, 2025 12:00 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (3 responses)

I have expected Microsoft to implement Windows as an API layer on Linux (essentially like WINE, but with the authority and funds of Microsoft behind it) for about 20 years, with the benefit that they would get a better kernel and would need less maintenance effort.

Microsoft has not gone there. I expect that they considered that approach, too, but that their current approach gives them more benefits, maybe just marketing, but maybe there are technical considerations, too: E.g., having software like Crowdstrike probably would not be very stable if they go with the mainline kernel, and sticking with one specific kernel increases the maintenance burden, so they might just as well stick with their current kernel.

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 10, 2025 19:24 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

Aside from the long tail of compatibility that they want to support to keep existing business, I believe they also use the Windows kernel as the basis for Azure, so they might see it as a competitive advantage against Amazon, VMware, etc. to have their own kernel hackers and their own customization. The cost of changing might not be something they can recoup given they seem to be in a sustainable state now when it comes to base OS kernel support. Whether Exchange, SharePoint or the Azure management plane are a steaming pile or not is unrelated to the quality and brand of the underlying kernel.

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 10, 2025 20:23 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> I believe they also use the Windows kernel as the basis for Azure

As I understand, most of the networking-level hardware in Azure actually runs Linux ( https://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-using-linux-run-c... ).

As for the hypervisor, the current generation of AWS products uses custom hardware to completely decouple the hypervisor from the underlying guest OS. So the type of a kernel that runs on this hardware is not really that important, in the grand scheme of things.

Obligatory Joke

Posted Jan 11, 2025 1:35 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Yeah, pretty much all datacenter networking hardware runs Linux now, AFAICT.

I was thinking of the hypervisor, as you said AWS has their own in-house thing, so did VMware and effectively, so does MS.