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Inside the Windows Vista Kernel

Posted by kdawson on from the deep-tech dept.

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."

3 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. OS classes will always be open OS based by GodWasAnAlien · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Black box OS kernels like Windows can really never be disclosed. All you can really do is make some guesses or have an insider reveal some limited details.

    For this reason, OS classes in school will be based on Linux,BSD,Minux,or even ReactOS. With all of these, if want to really know how it works, there is the code.

    The secret-software-business is quite different that the shared discoveries of the scientific method that works well in education and science.

    Historically, the open ones will be the only ones that survive. In 50 years: You want to know how DOS worked in the 1980s? Well, no source is available. But freedos provides a good example of how it worked. You want to know how some random UNIX worked. Well the source to that specific one is not available, but BSD and Linux are a good examples of how it worked. You want to know how Windows-2000 worked? Well, no source code is available, but ReactOS provides a close approximation of how it worked.

    1. Re:OS classes will always be open OS based by jadavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The secret-software-business is quite different that the shared discoveries of the scientific method that works well in education and science.

      Although you're right about closed software, computer science as a whole is actually much more open in many respects than some other scientific fields. In particular, the medical and biological science fields are quite closed-off. Even physics is somewhat closed-off, not by design, but because the equipment required to perform experiments is so expensive.

      Few computer science experiments take more than a couple thousand in capital investment. Also, if you have questions, you can often discuss your experiments, ideas, data, findings, etc. with an expert (or even industry leader) simply by signing up to a mailing list or going on IRC.

      --
      Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
  2. Re:MMCSS by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You've been able to set process priority through the Task Manager since at least NT4
    Forget CPU sheduling priority, that is indeed old hat. What I saw in this article that really makes me jealous, as a Linux user, is I/O priority. Why have the systems people iterated for decades on CPU scheduling, and sorely neglected scheduling more precious resources like the network and disk? I can "nice" my system backup script, but what difference does it make when it's hogging the disk so much I can hardly load a new application? Process priorities should by default apply not only to the CPU, but to the disk and outbound network queues.