Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
> Q. Is SONiC a Linux distribution?
> A. No, SONiC is a collection of networking software components required to have a fully functional L3 device that can be agnostic of any particular Linux distribution. Today SONiC runs on Debian
...There are several things I don't like about this article.
Not even Microsoft could pull that one off.
> ...There are several things I don't like about this article.
It reads like an April Fool's Joke circa 1996, you mean?
That doesn't sound very credible of them. The kernel is stuck as GPL; that won't change anytime soon.
If you ship a collection of software called a "distribution" that includes a copy of the Linux kernel, then that copy of the kernel remains GPL. The fact that it's on the same CD or server as some other MIT-licensed software is irrelevant.
So, having a GPL'd distribution means that the package sources and configurations and other such "distribution sources" have to follow the rules of the GPL. It doesn't matter what the license of the software itself is (it can even be GPL-incompatible or proprietary).
Porting them to another distribution would be work.
It allows the kernel's Layer-2 and Layer-3 switching/routing configuration to be reflected down into the switch offload hardware, and the switch's ARP and MAC table data to be reflected back up to the kernel stack.
The overall idea being you can continue to use the same userspace tools to configure the routing/switching, and it all just magically goes faster if you have supported switching hardware.
- nolan co-founder, CTO @Cumulus
Microsoft has a long way to go before they get the benefit of the doubt from me due to their decades of Embracing Extending and Extinguishing.
But now, they are trying to control the service/data, in which case the cloud-API (theirs, preferably) is what they want everyone to buy into. In that model, they deploy completely proprietary service interfaces (similar to what Amazon does with AWS, stripe with their API, etc..) - but at the same time, they want to have 100% support of all platforms - particularly in the mobile world where they have round-off presence.
Net-Net, It's entirely rational for a profit-maximizing Microsoft (of 2016, at least) to play nice with all alternative client platforms. I believe Satya Nadella's Microsoft is going to be a very difference animal than the Balmer/Gates Microsoft.
I guess we'll see over the next 5 years, but it looks positive so far.
And if you think it's user-hostile for MS to not continue development of Skype on Linux, don't you have to agree that Instagram, Snapchat, and all the other app developers that don't release apps for Windows Phone are user-hostile as well?
The number of people who run linux on their desktop is probably on the same order as those who run BlackBerry - neither one of which has enough market presence to make it worth writing/maintaining apps for them. I'm pretty sure Skype isn't available from MS on OpenBSD either. (And, honestly, pretty soon, I wouldn't be shocked if Windows Phone doesn't get the same care and attention that IOS does).
see a few things like http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-open-sources-its-edge... or https://code.visualstudio.com/ or http://www.wired.com/2016/01/microsoft-tries-to-one-up-googl... or https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet
I still find it incredibly hypocritical of people's anti-Microsoft stance while they walk around with their Apple products. I seriously see more Macs at every Linux event then any other kind of computer. Most Anti-Microsoft really is anti-Steve Ballmer.
But I certainly agree that the linux community on a whole should re-evaluate its position on MS. If you expect that to happen over night, you are a fool.
NOT defending the bad parts of MS but people treat MS as the evil empire when it was a divided HUGE company. Inside MS there were plenty of positive open source people and projects inside of MS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
I believe the Anti-MS is way out of proportion and distracts from worse offenders. Look at Oracle that company is the devil to Open/Free software and people will still run Oracle products all the time. (Stares at my own OpenBox for use with Vagrant on my Windows machine next to me). IBM and their incredible patent farm (IBM year in and year out the number one patent company in America).
Apple is the polar opposite of the open source movement. Apple has been guilty of price fixing ebooks, patent misuse and the copyrighting of design and slide to unlock. Apple does not work with the community but behind high secret walls. You share a secret and they might send the police after you or sue you. They black list reporters that share an opinion that is negative to Apple from access to the company, events and products.
So yes MS has made many bad moves but I wouldn't even say they are the worst. If you take out anything Steve Ballmer has said they are actually were better then most.
Open Source Movement has won and we should celebrate the victories. SQL Server on Linux I wouldn't have thought this in a million years and C# opened. These are amazing days.
TBH I agree with you on most points, but calling linux users who have mac hardware hypocrites is a stretch given MSFT's track record.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/micros... https://libgit2.github.com/
When Microsoft put Nadella in charge, they made a great decision. And I honestly don't say that very often about top level management.
To put it another way, Nadella's appointment wasn't a coup d'etat. Microsoft under Ballmer ejected several hard chargers in line for the throne and they weren't the one's who saw open source as the way forward.
Or to be precise, he said that:
"[W]e have a problem ... when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."
and of Linux and Communism:
"There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free."
Speaking of which, did anyone ever end up apologising for the 80286?
Also, there was another way of getting the processor back into real mode that was even more fun. You'd initiate a triple fault to trigger the reset, because that was faster than asking the 8042 to do it for you. Oh, the good old days.
Someone should apologize for the whole machine...
And honestly, we all know that x86 is an awkward architecture at best, hampered by the need for obsessive backwards compatibility, and that without the huge binary footprint, ARM and RISC would have won.
Remember when Andrew Tanenbaum said that his issues with Linux's design were a moot point, because we'd all be running HURD on RISC machines by the year 2000? Have you noticed people in the Linux crowd saying that Wayland will kill X? You'd thing we'd have learned our lesson by now: Backwards compatibility trumps all.
The 24 bit address space meant that developers had to deal with some sort of funky segmented addressing scheme I believe that was also a pain on the 8086 and I think a nice flat 32 bit memory space would have been a whole lot better.
Bill Gates called the 80286 "brain dead".
I seem to recall it being effectively a faster 8086 but its extra capabilities were both underpowered and impractical to use.
Microsoft already have binary logging that's much harder to read than text files. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent to process reaping, or whether that's handled by the kernel.
The two really are 1:1. Windows under the hood is VERY UNIX like. More so than most people realise.
I find this really amusing. I've been reading "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"[1] and Dave Cutler is described as VERY anti-Unix. He considered it an inelegant system developed by a bunch of PhDs doing their own thing their own way.
He'd probably hate your comparison.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generati...
That's a comparison that comes with a lot of caveats. The timeline of Windows NT versus things like the IBM System Resource Controller and the Solaris Service Management Facility is one such. Another is that it really depends from which Unix; even setting aside the fact that systemd only runs on Linux, not Unix. There are some significant structural differences, moreover.
* On AIX, the program that runs as process #1 is init, processing inittab and handling runlevels. Service management is done by another program (srcmstr) running as a separate process; which client programs send commands to via /dev/SRC, a local domain socket. Terminal login is not considered to be a service to be managed as other services are, and is spawned by init not by the SRC.
* On Solaris, there is an init program that runs as process #1, handling runlevels. The SMF master restarter (svc.startd) and configuration manager (svc.configd) programs run as separate processes; instructed by client programs such as svcadm and svccfg. Terminal login (as of Solaris 11) is considered to be just another service managed by the SMF, an instance of svc:/system/console per terminal.
* On Linux or FreeBSD/PC-BSD running nosh, there is a system-manager program that runs as process #1, handling system state. A service-manager to supervise services runs as a separate process. Commands such as service-control and system-control communicate with with them via FIFOs and files in the filesystem. Terminal login is considered to be just another service managed by the service manager, one ttylogin@ttyN service per terminal.
However:
* On Windows NT, the first user process runs the Session Manager program (SMSS.EXE). Services are managed by another process running the Service Controller (SERVICES.EXE). Client programs send commands to the Service Controller and to the Session Manager using "Native API" LPC; the former to manage the supervision of services and the latter to do things that don't really have a Unix/Linux equivalent like turn on the POSIX subsystem in a session. Terminal login is not managed by either the service manager or the system manager, but by the WINLOGON and Local Session Manager programs, and is not treated as anything like a service.
Furthermore:
* On Linux running systemd, there isn't the dichotomy as in the aforementioned systems. System and service management are both done in one program, running as process #1, not in two separate ones. There isn't one direct control/status API, either. The process #1 program exports a Desktop Bus interface, which requires that a Desktop Bus manager daemon be running. To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem that results (since the Desktop Bus daemon is a service that is managed by the process #1 program), there's a separate, private and intentionally undocumented, "bus" API directly to the process #1 program. This is "known" only to the systemctl program. There's also a handshake between the process #1 program and the Desktop Bus manager daemon, activated by its largely undocumented --systemd-activation option, whereby the latter tells the former when there's a Desktop Bus for it to register its API with. Terminal login is a service managed by the mixed-together service/system manager, an instance of the autovt@.service service per terminal, with activation of these terminal login services controlled by another service, systemd-logind.
I'm starting to believe that developers choose OS/Tools the are used to (Linux in this case) versus the one best suited for the job (BSD)
They do, and it isn't always the wrong choice. If you know the OS inside out it's better to use that than a brand new one you don't know the sharp edges of yet.
Whether one or the other is truly better though might be irrelevant...either is such a monumental improvement over the windows networking stack that there are bound to be large benefits.
Edit: See for example why VMWare bought Nicira: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26...
I promise this isn't a question to try to make a point, I'm genuinely interested.
Take the Cavium products: they shipped multiple distributions of Linux on the Arm64 products 2+ years ago, and FreeBSD around 18 months later.
The Juniper products only support Linux.
[1] http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Networking/SpecsAndDesigns
A lot of Juniper products arrive with FreeBSD pre-installed. They just aren't obvious about it.
But the OpenCompute ones listed don't.
I'm still baffled why people think this is a benefit. If you actually care about software freedom, lack of copyleft is a bad thing IMO. What's to stop $EvilCorp from creating a system that is completely locked down, can't be replaced, and is based on your technology? That's what UEFI is, by the way. It's only by Microsoft's blessing that you can install alternative operating systems on new Windows laptops. So please tell me more about why copyleft is a negative. If TianoCore was GPLv3, UEFI would actually be more bearable to work with (but core/libreboot is clearly the way to go on from here).
But IMO we should be all switching to CoreBoot (or LibreBoot). It's much less fucked up than UEFI, the only negative being that you have to flash it yourself (unless you buy a $1000 5-year-old Thinkpad).
[1]: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4...
Agreed re not using UEFI. I wouldn't touch CoreBoot though, LibreBoot seems more sane.
So, if/when it suits them, Microsoft are all over Linux
[1]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/16/linux_foundation_ker...
Linux is, legally, not Unix, and it is released under a license which does not discriminate based on who you are.
An awful lot has changed since then, including Microsoft buying a System V Unix license when SCO was extorting everyone (including Sun, as I recall) into doing that. There is so much water under the bridge, I imagine Microsoft could do it if they wanted to. But why?
I don't see how it's a good idea from their point of view. An ubuntu respin is about as far as I'd ever expect them to go down that path, and even that seems like more commitment than they'd want to make.
MS tends to keep a lot of fingers in a lot of cakes, even in surprising areas. Given the number of kernels MS Research has released, it wouldn't be too terrible of a stretch to see MS release some sort of unix at some point.
I think the big thing that would keep MSFT from rolling their own is fear of antitrust law, in the US and Europe. Less of a concern for them when it comes to Linux on phones or embedded, I believe.
From that article:
"according to AT&T, roughly half of the 500,000 Unix licenses are held by Xenix developers"
I really am amazed by that figure, though. Wow. And I had forgotten that xenix ran on some bigger machines, not just pcs.
They later bought Interix, who created the foundations of Windows Services For Unix, which was a much better and actually usable Unixlike layer, running directly as an NT subsystem, at the same level as Win32.
(This is as distinct from Cygwin, which supplies a GNU layer on top of Win32.)
PS - Although Microsoft still use Perforce internally also.
[citation needed]
Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and well. And improvements made to VSO have been shipping regularly as updates to accompanying TFS on-prem.
Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)? TFVC is also pretty popular as a Visual SourceSafe replacement and has been very stable for us, though the recent support of Git in Visual Studio and TFS has us considering it as an alternate workflow for some smaller projects. I think the support of Git is great, but knowing MS (and what they've said through their usual surrogates) I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.
Visual Studio Online supports Git. So, no, it is not "TFS in the cloud." TFS and Visual Studio Online are very loosely coupled.
> Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)?
I'm not confusing anything, I just picked one of Microsoft's many acronyms they use for it. Even Microsoft's own consultants call it "TFS" when talking about Visual Studio Team Services in Visual Studio Online. So if Microsoft's own consultants are "wrong" then I am in good company.
> I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.
I do.
It doesn't work very well: it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly, it has no concept of a pull request, offline mode sucks, branching/merging is expensive as all heck (inc. disk space, bandwidth, time, any metric), and even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github.
I've used both on VS Online, no comparison, and Microsoft's own staff seem to agree. It is only a matter of "when" not "if" TFS will die and Git will take its place (although I suspect Perforce will survive on the Windows team within Microsoft).
There's a reason Git has taken over the world.
On TFVC:
> it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly
It sends literally zero files anywhere until you interact with the server, as any sane server-based version control system would do. I don't know about your workflow but I don't know what you consider a reasonable amount of I/O to sync a workspace. You can elect "Local" workspaces since around TFS 2012 which can work completely disconnected if you choose.
> branching/merging is expensive as all heck
It's folder-based branching and can be done very quickly/cheaply if you don't store your entire company in source control. And how well does Git handle large files? Git is opinionated on branches and creates them cheaply/quickly; TFVC evolved from CVS-type systems where this was not the prevailing mindset, but again I don't know what you're considering "expensive." Maybe where you work?
> even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github
Which isn't evidence of anything other than it's their current tool of choice. That has a lot less to do with future direction of their enterprise products than you're assuming here.
> Microsoft's own consultants
> Microsoft's internal teams
> the Windows team within Microsoft
Do you have insider info or are you just trying to sound like you do?
And yes, we call TFVC TFS all the time :)
VSO is literally TFS in the cloud. Once x feature comes out VSO, then it comes out in TFS a few months later.
I assume they have a shared code base.
You confusing TFS(ALM- CI, Code Review, Testing, etc) with just the source control component
> "Most of our customers still use TFVC and we value this tremendously. Most people in Microsoft still use TFVC. Most new projects created today on VS Online choose TFVC."
Etc. It's quick and to the point, go read it. And again, has there been some sea-change at MS over the last year on source control? Quite possibly. But so far you've offered nothing but your opinion.
If they ported Windows to it, they could probably make a solid Wayland/KDE competitor.
It looks like Dell is working on it and there are rumors that Microsoft is encouraging Broadcom to release a SAI driver.
Wait. systemd, kdbus, GNOME and systemd-udevd. Shit.
We have met the enemy, and befriended it. Now we are the enemy.
Last I checked, kdbus isn't even being shipped in Fedora latest anymore.
[0] AKA: The engineers in charge of QA and technical critique of major changes to the Linux kernel.
I mean, honestly. Go look at some of Linus's usenet postings circa 1990-2005. This is exactly the kind of thing that he said should never, EVER, go into the kernel.
Therefore, I made today the day I officially switched my last debian system over to Devuan[0], which was easier than I imagined. No more systemd, or packages depending on it.
[0] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/159615/microsoft_redhat_partn...