Jim Lux wrote:
I don't know that Windows (at least since NT) isn't actually already a small kernel surrounded by (dare I say "embraced and extended by") a lot of utilities. Sure, they're not command line utilities with cryptic 2 letter names and a man page full of switches. However, an awful lot of what people talk about as "Windows" isn't the kernel (a lot of the GDI, for instance, has been separate from the "kernel", per se, since pre WinNT)
It is, from what I am told, possible to run windows entirely from the command line. I have not been able to myself (haven't tried in the last few years).
It is possible to run sshd via cygwin (and I think through the unix services bit).
[...]
It does all this now. The question is whether you can get rid of a lot of the other stuff, since at a very fundamental level, windows follows an event driven model, where the events are largely from user interaction. Inside the guts, a lot of the work is in deciding where (to which process) to send those events (e.g. a mouse move or click, or whatever).
If every VM needs a virtual KVM device ... :( "Give me a serial port, and give me bits ..." [...]
I would imagine that this is the case. Certainly, when NT first came out, there was great emphasis put on the Hardware Abstraction Layer (so you could run essentially the same OS on Alphas and x86s). The challenge faced by MS for Windows (as opposed to Linux) is that they need to have well defined hardware abstraction and the VM to real hardware layer tightly controlled, because it very important for digital rights management (to make sure that nobody can put a shim layer in and tap off the protected content). What is perceived as a virtue in the Linux world is viewed as a terrifying hole in the MS Windows DRM world.
I am fairly sure that DRM wasn't on the mind of the designers around the time of the Windows NT Alpha. It was serendipity (for them) that they were able to use minor display architectural shifts to enable this "needed" functionality.
I remember seeing the NT-Alpha version on some DEC boxen at SC95 or 96 or something like that. Someone was trying to convince me then that NT was the death of Unix in supercomputing. I didn't hear much about digital media rights management.
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