Windows 7 Won't Have Compact "MinWin" Kernel

An anonymous reader points us to an interview Microsoft's Windows 7 development chief, Steven Sinofsky, did with CNet. He reveals that Windows 7 will be a further evolution of Vista, and will lose the rumored MinWin kernel. "We're very clear that drivers and software that work on Windows Vista are going to work really well on Windows 7; in fact, they'll work the same. We're going to not introduce additional compatibilities, particularly in the driver model. Windows Vista was about improving those things. We are going to build on the success and the strength of the Windows Server 2008 kernel, and that has all of this work that you've been talking about. The key there is that the kernel in Windows Server 08 is an evolution of the kernel in Windows Vista, and then Windows 7 will be a further evolution of that kernel as well."

MINWIN IS NOT A NEW KERNEL!

[EXMSFT]

Augh. The entire concept of MinWin has been lost to time. It's NOT a custom kernel. It's NOT a kernel rewrite. It is, and always was, the literal minimal version of Windows. MinWin was never a shipping feature that any customer would care about - in fact in the first iteration it was intended as the first, required, component of Windows embedded - the fully componentized version of Windows.

Re:Cynical First Post

[morgan_greywolf]

Uh, no, that's completely wrong [zdnet.com]. Unless you're suggesting that Eric Traut doesn't work for or speak for Microsoft. In the talk he gave, clearly MinWin was supposed to be part of Windows 7.

Re:Steve Jobs

[pdusen]

The last thing anyone needs is for Microsoft to be even less open than it already is.

Re:hmmmmm Vista... powershell ... winfs..... etc

[plague3106]

Last I read the WinFS project is totally dead. Many pieces of the technology that would have made up WinFS though live on in other areas; parts went into Ado.Net for example.

http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644706.aspx [msdn.com]

Re:Cynical First Post

[umofomia]

Uh, no, that's completely wrong [zdnet.com]. Unless you're suggesting that Eric Traut doesn't work for or speak for Microsoft. In the talk he gave, clearly MinWin was supposed to be part of Windows 7.

Wrong again... the ZDNet article mischaracterized his statements. He only says they built MinWin out of the current Windows 7 codebase. If you actually listen to the talk, he says: "This is internal only; you won't see us productizing this, but you can imagine this being used as the basis for products in the future." (said at 4:00 of the video clip on this page [istartedsomething.com])

Re:..and will lose the rumored MinWin kernel.

[ozmanjusri]

Windows cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility.

Write a new, well-designed OS. Include a minimalist Win32 environment in a VM sandbox. Basically, Wine for Windows to run legacy apps.

Apple has done it twice.

Re:Guarranteed To Suck

[Mongoose Disciple]

Also, .NET has really withered on the vine. Though you will always be able to find shops that use .NET, the general consensus that I've heard is that .NET is dying.

That's so so so not my experience in the market.

There's much more demand (as measured by people trying to hire me to use the appropriate technology) currently for my .NET skills than my Java skills.

Re:So the difference is...

[drsmithy]

Do you remember the last time you had a steak? [...]

I don't know where you eat your steak, but if it's doing that to you, you should go somewhere else...

Re:So?

[joshv]

Graphics drivers are in Ring 0, but well isolated. Early on my nVidia driver would crash rather regularly while playing games - rather than blue-screen as XP would have, the driver was reloaded, re-initialized, and I was back to the desktop in a few seconds. These days though this never happens.

Re:..and will lose the rumored MinWin kernel.

[glebd]

MacOS Classic -> MacOS X (basically the same as DOS-based Windows -> Windows NT, only a bit over half a decade later). What's the second one ?

Rosetta? (runs PowerPC apps on Intel Macs)

Re:hmmmmm Vista... powershell ... winfs..... etc

[PRMan]

With the Linux desktop, whichever variety you choose, there remains large technological advancements before it is usable by the general public. With Windows, it works, and has been working for over ten years for the majority of people.

Agreed about Windows for the last ten years, but the new Ubuntu just works. And I am a long-time Windows user that has tinkered with Linux since the 300 MHz days, constantly hearing about how it was the "year of the Linux desktop".

But I had a 1GHz laptop with XP that locked up all the time. I could never find the culprit (probably a driver or IRQ issue). I installed Ubuntu, it found all the hardware automatically, asked me my WAP password and away I went. It's fast and usable now, instead of slow and unreliable.

And we all know that hardly anyone installed XP on old computers -- preferring at the time their old Windows 2000, but eventually XP won people over as they upgraded.

I don't know any such thing. I was at three companies where everyone was upgraded to XP. People loved XP. Businesses waited for the correct timing in their budget, but there was little doubt that it WOULD be adopted. Vista is universally reviled and most businesses I know are saying that they will NEVER go to it.

I also value my time and have no problem spending a couple hundred on a new OS. But having dealt with Vista and Ubuntu Hardy Heron I would say that Ubuntu is way more hardware compatible and takes far less time to set up and install. And seeing how difficult it is to get software to run on Vista, it won't be long before Linux is more software-compatible as well.

Fully 40% of my software in my business wouldn't run on it without major work (and many of these were Microsoft titles), about 25% never did run at all. Every software install on the test machine was a pray-and-hack affair. It was exactly as if I was trying to get the software to run on Wine or Mono, instead of Windows.

Linux has easily passed Windows in hardware compatibility. Who ever thought we would see that day? Now the attention will go to software compatibility, and when Wine and Mono improve a little bit more, Linux will have the advantage there as well.

And I predict that it will happen before Windows 7 comes out.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hiden IE everywhere

[TomC2]

It first came in with IE4's "Desktop Update" for Windows 95, which gave Win95 a sort-of halfway to Win98 look. Win98 was the first MS OS to integrate file browser and web browser without additional software.

I remember installing the IE4 desktop update on my 486/66 with 8Mb RAM, running original Win95a, and it made a BIG impact on performance - suddenly folder windows took 10 seconds to open instead of being nearly instant.

Interestingly, MS appeared to quietly drop it in later IE versions. If IE5 or 5.5 are installed on a clean Win95a, the "desktop update" is not offered as an installation option.

MinWin clarification...

[brendan5]

Hey guys - I'm a program manager on the Windows Server team, and having been a long-time lurker on slashdot, wanted to point to the most cogent public explanation of what MinWin is.

Eric Traut's speech at UIUC got a lot of attention but has been largely misinterpreted. The interview at http://edge.technet.com/Media/567/ [technet.com] explains the relationship between Server Core and MinWin, and if you're interested in the subject matter, is worth watching (at the very least, for the inadvertent use of night vision by the cameraman).

Brendan

nitpick

[toby]

Champaign is the city in Illinois. Champagne (DOC) is the French sparkling beverage.