Inside the Windows Vista Kernel 298
Reader trparky recommends an article on Technet (which, be warned, is rather chaotically formatted). Mark Russinovich, whose company Winternals Software was recently bought by Microsoft, has published the first of a series of articles on what's new in the Vista kernel. Russinovich writes: "In this issue, I'll look at changes in the areas of processes and threads, and in I/O. Future installments will cover memory management, startup and shutdown, reliability and recovery, and security. The scope of this article comprises changes to the Windows Vista kernel only, specifically Ntoskrnl.exe and its closely associated components. Please remember that there are many other significant changes in Windows Vista that fall outside the kernel proper and therefore won't be covered."
Re:MMCSS (Score:5, Informative)
??? This is in Vista
thought for a second that they required admin access to activate MMCSS; but upon a second reading, it looks like they've merely reimplemented nice with some kind of setuid root service.
"nice" as you call it has been in NT since its conception.
He's talking about multimedia specific scheduling related to I/O operations here, you might want to read this whole document a 3rd time, he's not talking about "regular" kernel scheduling of threads/processes, he's talking about scheduling based on I/O needs which is a whole different beast.
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soft links? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soft links? (Score:4, Informative)
From wiki:
Soft Link [wikipedia.org] and Hard Link [wikipedia.org]
Re:Soft links? (Score:3, Informative)
Ideas borrowed from QNX. But bulkier (Score:4, Informative)
Much of this new stuff sounds like features of QNX. QNX has a "sporadic scheduler", for when you need things like 10ms of CPU every 100ms. QNX has had I/O cancellation for years. In QNX, you can set a timeout on any system call that blocks. If you set a 35ms timeout on a write, after 36 milliseconds, you'll have control back. Very useful in real-time systems where you're doing something less important, like logging, that should never take very long but, in some trouble condition, might. QNX has had prioritized I/O for years, too.
It all works, too. I've done compiles on QNX while running a real time program on the same machine, without the real time program missing a deadline.
Of course, in Vista, it's all more complicated.
Re:OS classes will always be open OS based (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/L
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soft links? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ntoskrnl.exe (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS classes will always be open OS based (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OS classes will always be open OS based (Score:3, Informative)
"You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the software."
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/l
Re:ntoskrnl.exe (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, the horrors! I've had this happen to me many times, as well, especially on Linux. Not even a kill -9 would get rid of the wedged process. Why is there even such a thing as "non-interruptible sleep"? If I don't need the process anymore, I should be able to get rid of it no matter what.
And wedged drivers, too. I think you can still see this for yourself by doing I/O with some USB device, and then yanking it out while the I/O is in progress. You get at least one process that you can't kill (I guess the comatose state causes ethical issues), and probably a driver you can't unload (although maybe new kernels allow you to do that). If you're "lucky", you get a whole lot of hardware devices that you can't use anymore, and any program that tries to gets into the dreaded D state.
Re:ntoskrnl.exe (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite... (Score:4, Informative)
The Winternals Administrator's Pak is also ">being discontinued [winternals.com], and have its functionality available only to those with Software Assurance agreements [microsoft.com].
Re:Is this the same as... (Score:2, Informative)
The NVIDIA drivers suck, but UT2004 and Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War work fine, if slower than in xp/2003. The old Ghost Recon and R6 games work ok too. Didn't have much time to test any other games yet.
Re:But it IS broken (Score:3, Informative)
The Tagging system for slashdot needs moderation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. A round robin scheduler, which runs every task for exactly 2 clock ticks except for foreground tasks which are run for 6 (or is this an XP improvement ?) - assuming there's no interrupts occurring during those ticks, of course - and not paying any attention to whether the task is IO- or CPU-bound. It performs absolutely shitty if you have anything heavy running in the background (say, POV-Ray rendering an image while you try to browse the Net). Praising that to be "O(1) scheduler" is about the same as calling the Goatse picture "art": sure, it may be technically true, but...
What Linux was praised was getting a scheduler that handles 40 priority levels, real-time tasks, and multiple CPUs (500+, in some cases) while retaining both interactivity and high throughput, and doing all this in O(1) time. No version of Windows has ever gotten even close.
Re:Making Symlinks in GUI? (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, now that Linux has the concept of UUID in filesystem structures, one could extend hard links to prefix an inode ID with the owning volume UUID and make cross-mount hard links possible.
e
Re:One "defect" is still there. (Score:2, Informative)