Another gem in the presentation is a rag on people using uninstallers and that Microsoft and a hint is dropped that Microsoft are working on the clean installation and uninstallation of software. Are they going to push and strengthen MSI? Package manager anyone...?

Does this new kernel mean MS will finally give up on backward compatibility?

There's no such thing as a hybrid kernel.

Yes, the broken Xen privileged guest model.

hrow out the code base, embrace FreeBSD 7, and build a virtualisation for compatibility; heck, even go so far to implement OpenStep

There's no such thing as a hybrid kernel.

For instance, the Microsoft hypervisor does not require special kernels... With Xen, they do need to be altered.

Read your own link, that's about Windows 7

There's just one problem with all this. MinWin isn't new. In fact, I wrote about it years ago here, here, and here. It's part of Windows Vista and 2008, and is at the core of these OS's internal componentization.

Why would I want to use a "freeware" operating system? Did you mean: "open source" ?

It is also not a huge departure from the NT codebase.

I don't know for sure, but I would wager strongly that this is 40 MB of total virtual address space.

Bloggers are *always* going on about where think they guessed something right in a previous blog entry. The problem is that his (and hence your) claims don't align at all with what Eric Traut of Microsoft, the man who actually knows (as opposed to guessing and blogging about it), said about MinWin. MinWin is, indeed, something new.

Now I wonder what's so large down there.

It's not as if he couldn't have also screwed up the history of MinWin as well.

You are right. As an OS design, Mac OS X is not that impressive except in its haphazardness. Especially the fact that there are two layers of APIs that are intermingled (the BSD layer and the Mach layer) without much apparent rhyme or reason.

Kaiwai is pretty much wrong on this one: the way to keep a system going over time is to loosen the couplings between its parts and replace them one or two at a time when the old design is outdated or when new techniques come about. Starting from scratch and rewriting is a recipe for disaster of Netscape Communicator proportions. The NT kernel is already designed well with componentization and loose-coupling in mind. Windows user-mode is evolving and it's not a one-release job.

Right. Since he made a couple of minor errors regarding an obsolete MS product from 22 years ago, it's obvious that Microsoft's Director of Kernel and VM Development just doesn't know that a major project which he and his team are currently working on is already being used as the basis of the company's flagship product. He mistakenly thinks that it's not being used anywhere yet.

I just know that people always have radical dreams of what's to come from events like this, feed off of the inaccuracies

Free (as in speech) OS

On the other hand, when RedHat stopped supporting RedHat Linux 9 (back in 2004), a large number of willing third parties took the code and continued releasing security updates. (And as far as I know you can still buy support for RedHat Linux 9) - Gilboa

Throw out the code base, embrace FreeBSD 7, and build a virtualisation for compatibility