LWN: Comments on "Microsoft Launches Linux Website (CIO)"

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

oak — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:11:35 +0000

Another nice thing Caldera released as GPL was GEM sources.
There are now legal ROMs for emulators running GEM, see e.g.
http://emutos.sf.net/.

Andrew Schulman's Dr. Dobbs DR DOS analysis

nix — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:27:51 +0000

Ah, yes, *that* was what I was thinking of: I forgot Schulman's name completely.

His early Undocumented DOS and Undocumented Windows books spend about a chapter on this one evil trick.

Microsoft Launches Linux Website (CIO)

frankie — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:21:10 +0000

I don't trust Greeks, also when they bring us gifts...

Andrew Schulman's Dr. Dobbs DR DOS analysis

kmself — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 04:37:36 +0000

There wasn't a Groklaw back then, but there was Dr. Dobbs. The legwork's now 13 years old. Read it your self in Andrew Schulman's Examining the Windows AARD Detection Code: A serious message--and the code that produced it. This concerns a bit of code, "AARD", heavily obfuscated and encrypted, included in a beta release of Windows 3.1 which produced a warning message when run on DR DOS, though the condition it tested appeared to have no impact on any Win3.1 functionality.

The AARD code has no relation to the actual purpose of the five otherwise-unrelated programs into which it has been dropped. It appears to be a wholly arbitrary test, a gratuitous gatekeeper seemingly with no purpose other than to smoke out non-Microsoft versions of DOS, tagging them with an appropriately vague "error" message.

Schulman goes on to discuss Microsoft's response to his inquiries, and possible motives:

I've presented the substance of these findings to Microsoft, at both engineering and management levels. At press time, a detailed response was not forthcoming, perhaps due to the ongoing FTC investigation. It's likely that a subsequent issue of DDJ will contain a more specific response. However, a high-level manager at Microsoft repeatedly told me that the company is "agnostic" regarding DR DOS. He added, "They [Novell] claim 100 percent compatibility, but DR DOS is full of bugs. If DR DOS has problems running Windows, Novell should fix them."

The implication is that if a Windows/DR DOS user gets an error message that a Windows/MS-DOS user doesn't, then by definition it is Novell's fault and proof that DR DOS isn't "100 percent DOS compatible." The problem with this is that, as Figure 5 shows, the AARD code's test for DOS compatibility is 100 percent artificial. By Microsoft's definition, only MS-DOS or something byte-for-byte identical with MS-DOS (and therefore in violation of copyright) is "100 percent DOS compatible."

As for "agnostic," this seems unlikely given the effort required to write this tricky code. Its presence in five otherwise-unrelated programs also suggests a fairly concerted effort, as it is unlikely that five so different programs are all maintained by the same person. In fact, the programs probably fall under the domain of several different product managers or divisions.

I very strongly recommend reading the entire article.

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

nix — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:06:09 +0000

MS definitely did play nasty games with the Win3.1 betas (involving poking in the guts of DOS to prove that it was MS's variant, and not DR DOS) to frighten DR DOS users, but as far as I know this was disabled in Win3.1 itself; although it was still visible in the binary, and still executed, the result of the test was ignored rather than triggering the nasty warning.

But then you knew that.

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

penguin — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:27:58 +0000

The DR DOS suit had merit from what i remember. Dig through the case and see for yourself. Out of the DOS versions i ran MS DOS was teh suck and DR DOS, NCR DOS and some others was amongst the best. You could actually make Windows 3 run ontop of NCR DOS with a small hack and windows became more stable than with MS DOS, you do the math.

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

viro — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:12:00 +0000

DR DOS? You mean another dead codebase bought by Caldera only to play
extor^Wlawsuit games, claiming that $EVIL_PEOPLE had cheated the damn
thing out of Great Shining Success(tm)? One where plaintiff prefered
to pay them off and get rid of the lawsuit?

I wonder if anyone had done groklaw-style digging through that one,
BTW - IIRC, the claims smelled very odd. Especially interesting
question is whether the success of previous sca^Wcampaign had lead
them to try and pattern the next exercise after it. MS had paid
them off again, so did Sun, IBM refused and the rest is history...

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

danielthaler — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:40:10 +0000

I don't think so.
People will just tell them (and everyone else) that it works fine in Xen/VMWare, resulting in lost customers and a bad reputation for Virtual Server.

Windows in charge of Linux execution?

Max.Hyre — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:01:30 +0000

From the CIO article:

Microsoft earlier this week at LinuxWorld released Virtual Server 2005 R2, the latest version of its virtualization environment for Windows that also supports the client and server versions of Linux

What subtle errors could MS introduce into a Linux instance running in a Windows virtualized environment? DR DOS, anyone?

``Gee, we don't know what could be going wrong. How 'bout trying Windows Server?''