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Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

Could somebody explain how this is possible, given RAM and CPU constraints? Like, does W10 actually run with that small of a footprint it works on a Raspberry Pi 2?

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Conceptually, it's just like Windows 8 can run both on a desktop as well as a Lumia phone. I'm not sure whether they actually share parts of the codebase (like the linux kernel does), or it's just some common UI elements like tiles + shared brand name on top of wildly different kernels.

In fact they use the NT-Kernel for Windows Phone as well. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-windows-phone-8-fina...

That is indeed very informative, thanks!

"...the Windows Phone OS will include the same file system (NTFS), same networking stack, same security elements, graphics engine (DirectX), device driver framework and hardware abstraction layer (HAL) as big Windows."

I hadn't realized they share so much. If this statement holds true for the upcoming Windows 10, then it's probably the very first time DirectX is running on any SBC. I wonder if Broadcom have made some changes to VideoCore GPU to support DirectX.

The RP2 is a pretty decent machine compared to the historical PCs that Windows was designed for.

Not sure about CPU but you can get Windows 8.1 devices with 1GB of RAM which run fine (and that's full desktop 8.1, not a cut down IoT build that this is likely to be)

For me it's the lower limit of what's possible and it's slow if you load up many apps, but definitely possible.

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