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Microsoft to 'Support and Usurp' Unix
qedramania writes "Computerworld has a report on the latest Windows server release and their Unix strategy." From the article: "R2 is built on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and is geared towards specific workloads such as storage management, branch office server management, as well as identity and access management. It also provides a subsystem which supports Posix applications."
Microsoft has had a POSIX subsystem for ages. It's called Windows Services for UNIX, and it works quite nicely. It's not a new thing.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
This isn't news. There has been POSIX Support in NT4 and win2k forever (so it seems), and Windows 2003 already can do NIS if you know what you are doing with schemas and the Services for Unix. The only thing "new" would be unix shells native to the OS... but this can be done effectively now with other packages like cygwin or MinGW.
--- I never lie when I have sand in my shoes.
Microsoft's been doing Unix since Linus an elementary school kid playing with his Vic-20. It was the first Unix I used, running on Tandy hardware.
The problem is, is that a lot of the unix software although ported to windows, doesn't run as well on windows. (i think) Apache starts a new process for each request by calling fork(). This works good in Unix where it doesn't take a whole lot of resources ( under a million cycles) to start a new process. However, just starting a process on windows takes 5 million cycles. Meaning unless the implementation of apache on windows, or windows itself is changed, then running apache on windows will always be inferior. I imagine the same problem exists on many other servers that have been ported to windows. It's nice for people to experiment with these tools without switching their OS, but really they should be switching the OS if they want the best experience possible.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Just to drive the point home;
Where is fork()?
What point? Win32 does not have a fork, as that MSDN page describes. Win32 itself is not POSIX. SFU *is* POSIX. SFU *does* have fork(). Try 'man fork'.