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Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

This is good for gaming on Linux!

Future prediction: Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux. Reason Microsoft does not found main revenue through operating sales but of online cloud adoption and subscriptions. Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

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> Hackers reverse engineer Microsoft SQL server for Linux compatibility DLLs and adds better Wine support. Microsoft will eventually start selling a commercial Windows 10 compatibility layer for Linux

I like the optimism but I honestly believe it's going to go the other way round.

Based on Microsoft s EEE strategy from the past, combined with the way they've pushed for SecureBoot on x86 and Arm and the (re-)rise of the WSL, I honestly expect it to get even more difficult in the future to boot a linux kernel on your own hardware.

Once all the usual suspects work properly under WSL I think more hardware lockdowns are going to come into place combined with phrases like "what do you need a kernel for? just boot windows kernel and use your linux userland and stop complaining!". The rise of GNU/Windows might well be coming...

Or systemd/Windows, depending on how long it takes.

The only thing missing from SystemD to be a worse Windows is a binary configuration file.

I think Microsoft was right to push for Secure Boot / bootloader signing. The way they pushed for it was/is anti-competitive.

I don't think UEFI was the right horse to put money behind. It's a complicated hot mess and the most visible innovation has been to use UEFI identifiers for DRM within web browsers. Yay.

With intel ME next to it, it seems like asking for a metal door, with special key shapes the competition has a hard time to produce, but on a wall you know you can break with a hammer.

The current state of computing is less and less about being pro people, and more and more about pro big players.

>I think Microsoft was right to push for Secure Boot / bootloader signing

Signing by whom? The OEM of course because giving the key to the user would be unacceptably user-friendly for microsoft.

>I don't think UEFI was the right horse to put money behind. It's a complicated hot mess and the most visible innovation has been to use UEFI identifiers for DRM within web browsers. Yay.

UEFI was done that way for a reason. Don't underestimate Microsoft's influence on other companies. Same thing with big web companies pushing "open" standards that only they have the manpower to comply with.

That would be wonderful. If you're comparing kernel architectures, Linux kernel vs. NT is not much of a comparison. I will take NT kernel & gnu user space any day!

It's always nice to run a kernel designed by people who actually know what they're doing, and aren't doing it for the first time. Look into nt history, or how late Linux kernel started taking things like power management seriously. Hell, Linux kernel still insists on entirely living in nonpageable memory, most io is still synchronous, and there still is no stable driver API.

The linux kernel ain't perfect, but to say the NT kernel is superior is laughable imho. Take it with a grain of salt though as I am a greybeard sysadmin type who got so fed up with windows and MS that I moved completely to gnu/linux and haven't looked back.

Back on topic though, Skyrim normal edition installed and played just fine with proton for me on manjaro. This is nothing but good for us linux gamers.

Windows of today is nothing like what the original NT architecture was designed like.

NT sends CPU chasin' pointers between layers and layers of (filter) drivers in IRP madness.

But yeah, it's so great on NT I can set that 16 kB of IRQL passive level driver code pageable. Massive savings, and I'll only need to make sure I never ever run any of that code on IRQL dispatch or higher. If I mess up, the end user has a pretty blue screen to stare at.

I guess the impact of a pageable kernel was more important 10-20 years ago. Nowadays I rather allocate nonpageable memory just to avoid the headaches of not being able to actually use that memory at typical IRQLs a driver requires. For example DPCs run at dispatch IRQL, no access to pageable memory.

Microsoft of today is much more open source friendly than before.

When it's in their interest to be so, don't expect them to start giving away their bread and butter.

The only reason I still use Windows is Win32.

Explain?

Probably legacy software compatibility.

Win32 is the original API for writing 32 (and 64) bit software to run on Windows. WINE functions by providing a compatibility layer for Win32 API calls. If WINE evolves to a state that it can run enough of the nominally Windows-only programs that people need, there's no more need for Windows.

While I agree with you, it seems their bread and butter is shifting more towards their cloud-based services like Azure and Office 365.

That said, I don't see Windows ever going open source if only because of the huge amount of legacy bits and bobs borrowed from elsewhere that would be a nightmare to license.

The only thing I wish they'd open source (or provide Linux drivers for) is their Surface hardware drivers. I'm paying Microsoft more by buying the hardware than what they'd make selling me an OS license, let me install Linux on the damn thing without issues. If they did that I'd never bother buying any other type of laptop honestly. If I can run Ubuntu on a Surface with official Microsoft drivers I am one happy camper. I may very well keep Windows though for legacy .NET Framework stuff, but when doing .NET Core I prefer to just be on Linux and use either VS Code or Rider.

Just use win10 pro and use the Linux inside it... I've been using it and it is perfect. After you configure some good terminal to use that Linux and install your preferred text editor. It works well. You can access both file systems, run applications etc.

I do use WSL but it's just not the same at all. It's useful though but running Linux natively is another experience altogether. I can make my system as minimal as I want. There's the usefulness of WSL of not needing VM's which hog up all your ram as well just to run something under Linux.

Absolutely no way. I don't want anything that comes with windows, not just the tools available.

Why anyone would reverse engineer SQL Server for Linux is beyond me. It’s a good database...but it’s a trap. Once you’re on it, it’s nightmare to migrate off when you start hitting limitations. They go out of their way not to include features that make it possible to push data outside, so if your team is using even a single stored procedure for writing data you can’t just do it at the application level to bypass it.

Needs to be in less places, not more.

They're only after the compatibility shims in its code to make it work on Linux.

Isn't the next version of SQL Server supposed to run in Linux?

Sql server 2017 already runs on Ubuntu 16.08, really well.

It runs through emulator, too [0].

[0]https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/12/16/sql-se...

Yes. Not sure what this prediction means in light of that.

Someone can use the Windows Server DLLs that ships with Microsoft SQL for Linux and use those DLLs to run Windows games better on Linux. An assumption is that Microsoft has shipped a Windows compatibility layer with Microsoft SQL Server for Linux.

Which they did, based on DrawBridge. It’s pretty interesting, basically it’s the NT kernel as a library OS which hosts native PE binaries. There are some white papers around.

This is amazing, thanks for the pointer!

Indeed, I'd always assumed that it was running natively.

WSL works really well actually, like magically well. I do all my web dev work on Windows instead of my aging Mac now.

I'll second that. I've had a near perfect experience using WSL for development. One of the best things Microsoft has added to Windows in many years.

I wish it was made more apparent. They made a big deal about "Bash for Windows", and that was it. I really had no idea it was literally an entire Linux distribution sitting inside Windows, with cross platform mounts and command line accessibility to either OS.

Hah funny you should say that.. A long time ago some friends and I debated whether Microsoft would eventually just turn Windows into a Window Manager that would sit on top of Linux/BSD/Darwin or something like that..

This was before Apple stopped caring about OSX/macOS though, so not sure this would still happen..

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