Microsoft seems to be “all in” with its virtualization strategy these days: back in June we heard word of a client-hypervisor (Hyper-V 3.0) built into Windows 8 and in mid-July, Hyper-V for the upcoming Windows Server 8 was publicly unveiled. And I’ve dug up evidence of a much bigger presence of MinWin in Microsoft’s upcoming OS. So how is this fitting together? Is this the ultimate virtualization trio?
From the article:
It might also have behooved the author to give ye olden wikipedia a look before inventing his own definition of “minwin”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minwin
Basically, its a shifting definition that means whatever microsoft wants it to mean at the moment. You can’t have part of minwin, anymore than Chome has part of V8,or Android donut has part of dalvik. Winmin with the rest of windows evolves.
It appears to just decouple the kernel from the rest of the system, making a clean(er) break between the userspace API and critical kernel functions.
I do like the speculation that Windows 8 might actually emulate older software in a virtual environment to keep all the cruft off the main kernel and userspace.
Ideally every process would be contained in a sandbox, and running third-party oses could also happen seamlessly with VT-x extensions. Assuming you have the hardware, it runs at nearly native speed.
The only problem if this happens is that we will need processors that support VT-x and EPT. Intel has a bad habit of artificially segmenting those features on lower end processors. That would also leave a large part of the current market out.
The elephant in the room. My primary intel based work pc is a year old… no virtualization extensions. It was supposed to be a market segmentation ploy by intel ( if you need virtualization pay more), but it was never marketed well enough ( try guessing if a processor has virtuialization support by the name or date of an intel processor). Intel also claims that the extensions are a security risk, which is theoretically true. I’m not aware of any existing widespread threats that exploit the presence of those extensions.
Yet another reason to go with AMD CPUs. Everything but the Sempron includes SVM support.
… Keep in mind that this means that most of the existing PC install base doesn’t include virtualization support. (including the ATOM 330 based Asus 1201N that’s being used to type this post).
– Gilboa
Sometimes it gets really weird: Celeron Dual-Core E3400, a CPU available for 2 years, I believe, and which costs a bit less than 40€ for quite some time & is apparently the least expensive Intel CPU at retail (nice deal overall – 2.6 GHz, essentially a C2D with large part of L2 disabled, down to 1 MiB, and 800 MHz FSB; imperceptible difference in daily usage)… does have Intel VT-x (all Celerons from E3000 series do)
Edited 2011-08-08 22:37 UTC