Inside The Development of Windows NT

mrpuffypants writes "Winsupersite has a 3 part series this month about the history and development of Windows NT all the way up through Windows Server 2003. The author goes fairly in-depth describing how Windows is developed, managed, and how all 50 million+ lines are compiled daily. Part One covers the history of NT from its early days at Microsoft and Part Two discusses how the deployment of the forthcoming server version of Windows is coordinated daily." *shiver*

Comments

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but I think that's Waddle, the Beanie Buddy (a larger version of Waddle, the Beanie Baby). Penguins are cool to a lot of folks - and not all stuffed penguins are Tux.

Alpha

[deacent]

I see a lot of complaining in the article about how some architectures were not ready for NT on a timely basis (Intel i860, PowerPC), but I see no mention how they were so slow to bring NT to the Alpha. I recall that DEC actually ended up porting VMS to the Alpha because they were waiting on MS for their promised NT release. I'm a bit curious to hear from the developers about their perspective on that.

I've used both NT and VMS on the Alpha (as well as a Unix varient). NT is sooooo slow.

-Jennifer

The NT Kernel Is Good

[DakotaSandstone]

I know this is the equivalent of Flamebait on /., but the NT kernel (borrowed though it may be from other OS ideas) is actually darn good.

Passing IRP's (IO request packets) between drivers creates a much more well-defined interface that a bunch of globally namespaced functions just calling each other (like some other OSes we all know). It also lends itself to a layered driver model (Bus Driver, Physical Driver, Functional Driver) much better.

I really like the NT Kernel. What driver developers do with it isn't the kernel's fault.

Re:The NT Kernel Is Good

[DakotaSandstone]

Good point. That was a mixed blessing. But then again, so is the fact that any 3rd party can write a kernel driver (although MS is trying to assuage this with things like driver signing)

I've read some interesting defenses of moving GDI to the kernel. Some of the rationale was:

• GDI crashing, be it in the kernel or user mode, is basically a fatal system error. As designed, it is not clear how NT could "restart" a crashed user-mode GUI subsystem. Even if GDI is user mode, if it crashes, you'd probably have to reboot anyway.
• There are many other complex subsystems that exist in the kernel, and have been made pretty bulletproof (scheduler, disk subsystem). What makes the graphics subsystem any more dangerous? Yes, moving code to the kernel requires less buggy code, but we're Microsoft, and we're up to the challenge. It can be done.

Personally, I would love to see an OS take advantage of more than 2 of the 4 "rings" an x86 processor has. In such an OS, one could theoretically have a driver crash, and could still recover.

Until that day, though, I agree - GUI subsystem code is hard to make bulletproof, and moving said code into the "sacred" kernel is pretty gutsy.

Re:WinNT development cycle.

[MaxQuordlepleen]

[---snip---]
tanzarian:/$ grep -r ' goto ' /usr/src/linux | wc -l
1543
[----snip---]

that's from 2.4.19

How MS "punishes" bug meeting truants

[dpbsmith]

Let's see if I've got this right:

"This late in the development process, bugs are often passed along, or "punted," to the next Windows release--Longhorn--if they're not sufficiently problematic."

"The atmosphere in War Room is intimidating, and I spent most of my time in the room, silent and almost cowering, praying that Wanke wouldn't turn his attention to me or my group.... The most virulent treatment, naturally, is saved for those foolish enough to blow off a War Room meeting. On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."

So... in this macho atmosphere, reeking of testosterone... the punishment for not being that the bug meet is that... YOU DON'T HAVE TO FIX YOUR BUGS UNTIL THE NEXT MAJOR RELEASE?????????

Words fail me...