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.
Permalink for comment 316553
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-11-11
The registry really is implemented in the kernel ? The fact that it is used by the kernel early in boot does not mean it is linked to the kernel. Well, it depends what you mean bu kernel, then. /etc is used early in the booting process (to know which driver to load/not load, for example), and it has nothing to do with the kernel.
[q]
The registry is essentially a specialized filesystem. So it's a single point of failure inasmuch as a filesystem is a single point of failure.
But that's exactly what's bad with the implementation: (a fs) means that the configuration became a single point of failure. Also, having to reimplement all this as a fs is kind of stupid: why not using the FS for this ? This gives you more fine grained control (ACL are per key, right ?), but I fail to see how this is useful. This has never been useful on any other OS (and
I'd say the registry implementation is not so horrible.
The fact that it is not documented (applications put way too many things in there and cannot work when it is not there anymore; arguably not the fault of MS here, at least not directly), keeps growing is enough for me to say the implementation is quite horrible.
Have you had any specific problems with the NT registry?
All the time when I have to use windows to build software for windows. In particular, uninstalling an application always leave garbage in the registry, which is annoying when you install a new version of the same software (visual studio comes to mind: install visual studio 9 and 8 has still keys there, which confuses many softwares).
And it also means it does not work at all to reinstall the OS without reinstalling all the applications, even if they are still there: all the path informations about the software are again in the registry, which means nothing is self contained.