OSNews

It will be based on "Minwin" (they'll probably have an 'edgier' marketing name for the technology soon) and Windows has been able to emulate *nix for those few apps needing it since Windows 98.

... albeit with the world's slowest fork(2) implementation.

MinWin *is* marketing. Microsoft's marketing and HR teams realized that the perception among college-age developers that Windows is huge, bloated, and unwieldy was driving prospective developers away from the platform. MinWin is an attempt to demonstrate publicly that, although Windows is large and complex, the codebase is more structured and manageable than one might think.

They try to get away with calling MinWin a microkernel, but in reality it's just a logical subset of their existing monolithic NT-based kernel. They managed to split out the source code, make it separately buildable, and jazz it up for demonstration purposes.

I'm sure it was a somewhat useful engineering exercise internally, but it was primarily targeted at people like us here at OSNews. They need to sell us the idea that Windows development is sustainable, that they have a plan to mitigate code complexity and to combat "Brooksian" communications overhead.

It's a belated response to the success of bazaar-style development models such as Linux and KDE. See, our software is made up of parts, too. Vista was a fluke. We can scale. We can hack on this codebase for decades to come. No dead ends here. It's not a mess, we know what we're doing, and we've got it under control.

That's the message that underlies MinWin.

Minwin is just a striped down kernel. I assume this means most of the kernel device drivers and subsystems have removed.

I think Minwin is a proof of concept more than anything because no practical OS can be made from such a striped design. Well, not if you want any decent hardware support that is. ;-)

Edited 2007-11-12 22:16

"""

"""

I am not an MS fan. But I was actually pretty excited about the Minwin concept... at first. I really liked the sentiment. But then I took a look at what MS's idea of "min" actually is:

http://www4.osnews.com/permalink?280016

61MB, and it can... just... barely... run an in-kernel web server. The video the story that post is attached to emphasizes just how limited minwin's capabilities actually are. So what is it doing with all that virtual memory?

As another poster pointed out, NT nominally had a POSIX personality, for all the use it was without comprehensive support from MS. POSIX compatibility is and always was a checkbox for the marketing department.

Edited 2007-11-13 00:34

The article you're linking to states 40MB in runtime memory, 25 MB on disc (divided among 100 files).

Besides, Minwin is not meant to run on its lonesome -- although, it would be a neat challenge to wrap as small of a wrapper as possible around it while still keeping it functional and create a "D*** Small Windows."

EDIT: Silly quoting system.

Edited 2007-11-13 00:54 UTC

After our discussion last time, I spent some time playing around with the MinWin ISO image. You have to understand that MinWin is not a product and it is not really an attempt to squeeze Windows or to make an embedded system. For instance, many of the files in the MinWin image are actually language files. MinWin is more of a division of the existing Windows into a minimal bootable component for internal organizational purposes. I would forget about comparing MinWin with your minimalistic Linux router stack.