How far till windows ships with a whole linux's kernel down there?

dmitrygr · on Dec 3, 2016

Considering that NT kernel is a much better design, I'd rather get Linux Mint (with UI) on top of NT.

fermuch · on Dec 3, 2016

Could you provide some link to read about this? First time I've heard about it.

EvanAnderson · on Dec 3, 2016

My respect for NT grew tremendously after reading one of the early editions of Mark Russinovich and David Solomon's "Windows Internals". I haven't seen more recent editions but I'd suspect they just as informative.

The Wikipedia article on NT architecture is decent enough (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT), and some quick searching brought up this slide-deck from 2008 that's pretty good too: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~zwang/files/cop4610/Fall2016/windows....

I'm most impressed w/ the kernel object manager and the pluggable user-mode "personalities". I've always dreamed of an NT "distribution" that didn't have Win32 but, instead, shipped with the Interix (aka Service for Unix) POSIX personality.

bitcrazed · on Dec 9, 2016

For those who are interested, the next version of Windows Internals is available for pre-order from Amazon :)

https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Internals-Part-architecture-m...

Oh, and @EvanAnderson - you might want to take a look at the Windows Sybsystem for Linux (WSL) - which allows you to run unmodified ELF64 Linux binaries directly on Windows:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/06/02/lear...

besselheim · on Dec 3, 2016

They already emulate a Linux kernel, in recent Windows 10 releases: https://msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl/about

dom0 · on Dec 3, 2016

The NT kernel was always heavily modelled after the unices of the time (but avoided quite some flaws from the get-go, and of course had quite a lot of differences as well due to that and other necessities, like the driver API).

criddell · on Dec 3, 2016

I thought it was more DEC-ish (VMS?).

serge2k · on Dec 3, 2016

It is, Cutler famously hated Unix.

Dylan16807 · on Dec 3, 2016

This is just a policy change. No new features.