Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture | Hacker News Reader

Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture

blogs.msdn.com

54 pointspcj39 comments

Content-wise, the good thing is that there is quite some information here. One thing that caught my attention is the phrase "Metro style apps available from Microsoft that support a wide variety of industry-standard media and document formats". It made me wonder whether we will see a PDF viewer from Microsoft.

Style-wise, as often when reading MS 'blog posts', I wonder how many marketeers were in the committee writing it. This post is way longer than its content deserves, with repeated almost content-free adjectives such as "unique" or "intrinsic". To make things worse, it seems to suffer from serious copy-paste errors (for examples, search for "has a very high degree of commonality" or "enables creativity").

The post also sometimes almost conflicts with itself due to what I imagine to be marketing forces. For example: "WOA builds on the foundation of Windows" vs "With WOA you can look forward to integrated, end-to-end products—hardware, firmware and WOA software, all built from the ground up"

I also found it funny to read "of what we call, for the purposes of this post, Windows on ARM, or WOA". Are they really thinking that will prevent people from calling it WOA elsewhere? In a similar vein, we have "Note: This is not a product plan or even a hint at a product." and "(which are not the subject of this post)" Phrases like that belong in a press release, not in a blog post.

As a final reason why I do not like the writing style, I had to laugh when, over 1300 words in the article, I find "This post is organized with the following sections"

A metro PDF reader from MS for windows 8 has already been confirmed (apparently) http://www.addictivetips.com/internet-tips/windows-8-modern-... although it wasn't in the developer preview from what I could see.

I was wondering how Intel was liking the Windows on Arm development. The third paragraph of this is a bit telling in that regard. It's hard to tell if it's a shoutout to Intel/AMD to assuage their fears or just an acknowledgement of the work everyone put into it as a whole. Either way, it reads as a "don't worry, Intel, you still matter to us!"

Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself. [1]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one... why would they limit the OS, instead of saying that Metro was it, and have the Office15 team build out Metro versions of their applications?

Having the desktop/classic mode be only for built-in utilities and Office seems, at best, extremely short sighted.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-...

Just a guess, but Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office so I suspect the Office group insisted on being there at release to show existing customers their commitment. No doubt there are currently a lot of restrictions about what you can do on a WOA desktop, they may not have even provided anything like the full Win32 API. It wouldn't surprise me to see them loosen up those restrictions eventually.

Plus, by keeping all the desktop utilities like Explorer and Control Panel as desktop apps in WOA it reduces the amount of work that needs to be done. When Windows 8 is being used on a desktop PC you'll want those to still be desktop apps, and they probably won't be used enough on a tablet to justify rewriting them all as Metro applets.

I'm sure they insisted on it, but they could have done more than flattening the style on their buttons. Having Office as the lone desktop app is going to piss off more Windows developers than it's worth. Choose your own baby/bathwater, forest/trees analogy here.

Why do you assume that the Windows Store won't include desktop applications?

They may, ala iPhone & apps vs. web apps -- but I'm forced to take Sinofsky's word at face value at this point.

If I get this right, the only apps you will be able to run in the Desktop are:

- Internet Explorer 10

- Office 15 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote). What about Outlook, Visio, etc.?

- Windows Explorer

- Wordpad? Solitaire? Remote Desktop Client?

And that's it.

If I want to, say, unrar or un-7z a file I just downloaded, I'll need to go back to a Metro 7z app to do that?

Or what if I want to use Chrome or Firefox? Does this even comply with Microsoft's EU obligations (the browser ballot, etc.)?

Leaving the desktop environment only available to Microsoft apps is a very slippery slope, and I think it'll be a serious point of contention for developers and users. It really has to be all-or-nothing.

I'm glad they finally released good details on what is and isn't possible on Win8/ARM. My takeaway from this is: while they're not doing it, nothing is stopping someone from emulating Win/x86 applications on ARM. I've been playing around with doing it (nothing serious, just working through some of the tech challenges and using it as an excuse to learn LLVM better) and while there are challenges, it's definitely not insurmountable.

I have a feeling that if Win8/ARM takes off, this could be a big market -- maybe I should take it a bit more seriously.

As the owner of a HP Touchpad, I'm incredibly disappointed by this line

>Windows on ARM software will not be sold or distributed independent of a new WOA PC

I don't want to have to buy a new tablet with the same hardware just to run a new OS. Hopefully Technet subscribers can get a copy, or XDA et al can manage to provide. It'd be nice to have a legal option, though.

Your TouchPad doesn't have UEFI and there are no Windows drivers for the TouchPad either.

It would be possible, though probably not easy, if the proper people had the proper access.

There's a Hackintosh community so I'm sure there will be a Hackdows community, but MS isn't going to ship a version of Windows that requires "community" drivers to work. As far as MS is concerned it's WHQL or nothing.

The Hackintosh community is greatly benefited by the fact that OSX's Darwin kernel is open source.

For instance, Atom support was lost somewhere along the official way, but third-party patched kernels exist to reintroduce it (c.f. Nawcom et al).

It doesn't sound like you'll have access to the Win32 API, so you'd have to translate all the Win32 API calls made by the x86 application into WinRT calls.

And will they actually let you sell an application through the Windows Store whose purpose is to run other non-Window-Store-acquired code? It seems likely that they'll have to institute a policy against such applications, just like the Apple App Store, to prevent end-runs around the Windows Store.

"End-users are technically restricted from installing a different OS (or OS version) on a device or extending the OS, so this is generally not possible, and rarely supported by the device maker. "

and

"We architected our approach to ensure that software and peripherals can all benefit from the diversity enabled by the ARM architecture, along with the choice of form factors and manufacturers, and the openness of the platform."

seem to be in conflict. How is my being unable to install an OS a good thing? These comments (along with later mention of UEFI and some other things) cause me some discomfort.

Well, looks like Apple won the hearts and minds of consumers--we now are looking at a future with much greater integration of software and hardware and much less freedom. Thanks folks.

EDIT: To clear up potential confusion, I'm not saying that what Apple did was not good business or that their success was totally bad--I merely am pointing out that the tight UX pushed by that company (and then aped to varying degrees by others) has out of necessity driven things in this direction.

EDIT2: "In fact, WOA only supports running code that has been distributed through Windows Update along with the full spectrum of Windows Store applications." Oh goody.

The first sentence is related to policies of the device maker and the second is to M$'s policies

Ever since I've gained the ability to downvote, I've used it exclusively for people who write M$. Ignorance should never be tolerated.

...and locking out Linux (and other open source operating systems) with the help of the UEFI secure boot.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/microsoft-manda...

Buy an Android tablet and jailbreak it.

Without a way to install WOA (MS says they won't provide images for it), that won't help.

We're talking about Linux. If you want Linux on an ARM tablet, buy an Android tablet and jailbreak it. You don't have to buy a Windows tablet (unlike, say, PCs in the 90s).

And there lies one mistake MSFT is making. I definitely wouldn't pay good money for one of these if it can't run anything besides Win8. Perhaps only if it has a well supported jailbreak.

People who immediately remove your software (and sometimes ask for a refund) aren't a good target market. Seriously, why do you want to buy a Windows tablet and remove Windows? Why not buy what you actually want?

Because with Apple and MSFT requiring UEFI locked ARM devices, how much choice do you think will be available for people looking to buy ARM tablets they can run any OS on?

Sorry, I thought this was a post discussing Windows on ARM devices and how you couldn't dual boot Linux and Windows on them. Odd that Microsoft would be talking about Linux.

So it will include desktop support. That makes it much more interesting.

It'll include desktop support, but Microsoft will be the only one allowed to release desktop apps for it, which makes it rather less interesting.

Biggest takeaway is that everything is a PC. That ARM tablet you're holding in your arm? It's a full PC and won't be artificially crippled to being a consumption device only. Plug in or a dock a keyboard/mouse and you get the full notebook experience.

That nebulous 'consumption only' meme is so stale.

Where something sits on several axes of flexibility is certainly interesting and can be cause for concern, but let's lose the nonsense disproved by real software.

Yeah, there are plenty of blog posts out there telling people how some developer switched to developing on his iPad or installed vim or a SSH client. Personally, I do a lot of work on my Touchpad with a bluetooth keyboard. It's portable, effective (if not 100% efficient), and I don't look like a tool dragging my laptop around places (no honey, I'm just bringing the tablet!).

> Yeah, there are plenty of blog posts out there telling people how some developer switched to developing on his iPad or installed vim or a SSH client

There are a few, and we could probably enumerate them all right here. The reason they stand out is that almost no one does that, and that it's not an effective development environment for most people.

Personally, I'd sooner shift careers to road mending than try to program on an iPad.

> Personally, I'd sooner shift careers to road mending than try to program on an iPad.

And, personally, I'd love to be able to run Xcode on an iPad. With a Bluetooth keyboard it would be practically identical to the laptop I use now, but better for my back and wrists.

How is using vim on an iPad any different than using vim on a laptop/desktop? Connect a Bluetooth keyboard and you're doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is a smaller screen size, but vim doesn't really care.

Are you sure about that? This seems to say exactly the opposite.

In fact, WOA only supports running code that has been distributed through Windows Update along with the full spectrum of Windows Store applications.

WOA PCs will be serviced only through Windows or Microsoft Update, and consumer apps will only come from the Windows Store, so you never have to worry if a program will run because you are not downloading or installing from a DVD outside of the store experience. A WOA PC will feel like a consumer electronics device in terms of how it is used and managed.

This seems like a policy adopted to help avoid angry customers making a big deal about how they cannot install this or that application from their PC. Consumers are familiar with the App Store concept.

Ergo, they probably won't be working hard to lock the platform from other applications (what little applications that will exist, that is)

I think the video is an insight into the quality of Apple vs. Microsoft products. Apple would never let out a low quality product video like the one linked in this article. They didn't even have a decent microphone for the video and I was distracted by background static. Apple's culture embraces every aspect of a product's launch, with a product video being clean and simple just like their end products.

Apple wouldn't release something like this because they are a black box. At least Microsoft is blogging about the process and eliciting feedback along the way.

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