Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 30th May 2008 14:49 UTC
We have learnt quite a lot about Windows 7 this week, and one of the things was that Windows 7 would not get a new kernel. The call for a new kernel has been made a few times on the internet, but anyone with a bit more insight into Windows' kernel knows that there is absolutely no need to write a new kernel for Windows - the problems with Windows lie in userland, not kernelland. While the authenticity of the Shipping Seven blog is not undisputed, the blogger makes some very excellent points regarding the kernel matter.
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Member since:
2005-11-11
I don't see how you can say it is harder to corrupt: if the registry is corrupted, you simply cannot use windows anymore, you have to reinstall it. Difficult to have easier to corrupt: that's a single point of failure. Which is certainly not the case of /etc. The goal of the registry was to have a single place to handle configuration, but it was because windows did not have a sane way to store configuration (one directory for the system, and $HOME/.foo directories for users).
The equal statement to this fellow's assertion is "the /etc/ tree has to go!" I don't think either of those statements is true.
No, it is not: the problem is not using configuration in a centralized manner, the problem is the implementation of the registry, which is horrible (binary, keeps growing, etc...). But this is arguably a complex topic: /etc is certainly limited once you want to manage many machines in a large network, and it is a shame that every software uses its own configuration format (with different behaivour related to escaping, etc...). The .ini is actually often enough for simple applications. To solve the network adminisation problem, Solaris and mac os X for example have their own way to deal with it in a centralized manner. But /etc is still there.
Anyway, this has not much to do with the kernel.