I really look forward to the day NT's source is released. It's a truly fascinating kernel. Imagine somebody building an entire Unix on top of NT! Like WSL, but even beyond.
We'd finally have the GPL-licenced microkernel OS of Stallman's dreams.
;)
* it is optimized for integration with third party software from people who don’t have the source, so for instance the driver model is interesting
* the built in configuration system (the registry) and how it’s used throughout
* the (underused) personalities system you can use to show different apis to different binaries
* the security model is much more interesting, while in Linux you have ‘root’ and everything else, on Windows this is much more granular (unfortunately it’s so complex it’s basically impossible to use).
The architecture is really quite interesting, even though Microsoft didn’t make a lot of use of a large part of it.
Hardware is actually mapped as an object namespace, which is presented to the user as the drive letters. This was exposed with Windows XP booting in safe mode; during the boot process it would print file paths as object paths, not drive paths.
Much as I'm more in the *nix way now, there's plenty of curiosities to explore and tinker in Windows.
Well, you do have:
- capabilities (which are so coarse-grained as to be practically useless)
- 8 types of namespaces
- seccomp-bpf
- LSM (AppArmor, SELinux, TOMOYO, etc)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...
Windows also differentiates between the human ADMINISTRATOR account and machine "root" accounts like "LOCALSYSTEM".
User accounts are also disambiguated by "domain"; ADMINISTRATOR on the local machine is not automatically the same as the domain-wide ADMINISTRATOR.
The limitation is that there is one user ID, 0 which can do everything and all the other IDs can do almost nothing.
This has nothing to do with domains and everything with the distinction you describe between the Windows Administrator, local system or even more powerful trustedinstaller accounts.
This does technically give Windows some advantage here as SID's are namespaced - you can have multiple domains in a forest, domain trusts, etc - but I don't think as far as realistic number of users accessing a network it makes much of a difference.
Where it does suck on Linux, however, is user namespaces. 32-bits is a lot when it comes to just giving out accounts, but it's nowhere near enough to give every user a 16-bit chunk of accounts for mapping the traditional 0-65535 (because nobody) ranges for use with unprivileged user namespaces. I'd really like to see a push for 64-bit uid/gid's for this reason.
Also, Windows SIDs are fixed-size 128 bit. They were supposed to be GUIDs, but they are not that random; user SIDs contain common prefix from the domain SID.
A lot of innovations on NT are late as well to be fair, like the whole Application Views (?) of the system (basically an FS/Registry app sandboxing)
Linux has this, but it is, as you say, underused.
Sadly, that usually means it’s bugged as hell and impossible to use unless you’ve been trained for many years at ms to do that.
Since Vista, official support for a C++ subset.
In kernel IPC, namely LPC, to mimic micro-kernels architectures.
If we're picking on Linux here we should also mention that this issue cannot exist on Windows because it doesn't support anything else besides NTFS and a couple of options dating back to the 18th century or so.
Oh, and WinFS, of course, F being short for future which is like the horizon, or the communism, always out there just a month or two away.
Online the oldest is the 7th edition appendies which has details on A)Unix bsd B)Mach and c)windows 2000.
Windows 2000 was the next version of NT. Interesting if long reads about OS architecture.
http://bcs.wiley.com/he-bcs/Books?action=resource&itemId=047...
“ n the mid-1980s, Microsoft and IBM cooperated to develop the OS/2 operating system, which was written in assembly language for single-processor Intel 80286 systems. In 1988, Microsoft decided to make a fresh start and to develop a “new technology” (or NT) portable operating system that supported both the OS/2 and POSIX application programming interfaces (APIs). In October 1988, Dave Cutler, the architect of the DEC VAX/VMS operating system, was hired and given the charter of building this new operating system.”
The kernel itself is very interesting, regardless of what happened in the Linux world. If all you ever look at is Linux, you get stuck in Linux ideas of how things should, or even can, be done.
What? Can you elaborate? I mean if you want non blocking IO from an fd in Linux, you can just do that. Not sure what defaults have to do with anything. Your code will still have to be written appropriately.
On NT the standard way is async, and doing things in the block-and-wait way is abnormal and unusual.
Defaults matter. Because that's what most people will do.