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Inside the Windows Vista Kernel
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."
Isnt this like entering the belly of the beast? I will save you some time in reading the article.
:-)
Proper care for your Vista "Beast"
1) Feed it plenty of CPU cycles. Preferrably multiple cores.
2) Give it obsene amounts of memory. 2.5G preferable.
3) This one seems to really enjoy Video Ram as wll, probably it tastes better. 256M advised.
4) Keep feeding it a constant supply of disk space. Interestingly enough, this version seems to consume HD space simply with doing nothing.
Thats the basics folks. Give your Vista beast what it needs and you should have a kind of good experience. At least for at least 6 months or so... Then you must slay the beast and re-install..
Cancelling I/O has been in Windows for long, "just" not always done properly. I have seen similar issues while killing processes in other OSes where they are stuck in some I/O. One reason for why this happens more frequently in Windows (in addition to bad drivers/a complicated driver model) is the fact that asynchronous I/O is so common. That way, you might not see the that the IO got stuck until you try to kill the process.
The symlink(2) manpage mentions that they're also known as "soft links", as opposed to the hard links created by link(2). It's not a very common usage, though.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
They actually have a screenshot of what it looks like inside the Vista kernel.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
cfq/ionice is for reads only. "Due to the complex path writes take to get to the io scheduler there is no ionice support for writes yes so they are all treated equally." It'll happen...
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
`` I have seen similar issues while killing processes in other OSes where they are stuck in some I/O.''
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Does anyone else find it amusing that Wikipedia's page on soft links is a redirect?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.