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Windows 7 To Include "Windows XP Mode"
Z80xxc! writes "Paul Thurrott's WinSuperSite reports that Windows 7 will include a built-in virtual machine with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP Professional SP3. The VM runs in a modified version of Virtual PC, and applications running in the VM can interact directly with the host operating system as if they were running on the Windows 7 installation itself. While details are scarce for now, it looks as if this feature will only be available as a (free) addon for Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. Also, a processor supporting hardware virtualization will be required, indicating that this is perhaps aimed more at power users and corporate users, rather than consumers. Microsoft confirmed the feature last night."
if it will run XP mode software, wouldn't that mean XP style viruses now have a key right into the system?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
... one of the drawbacks of the WIndows platform - from an development and engineering point of view - is that it's backwards compatible all the way back to (if I'm not mistaken) Windows 1.0. That's an insane codebase to be dealing with. By bundling an XP VM with Win7, they can- for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS.
Isn't that essentially what Apple did with the transition from 68000 series chips to PowerPC, from OS 9.x to OS 10, and then again from Power PC to Intel?
I've believed this was a necessity for quite a while.
D
http://www.bistolas.net
New, yes. Old i disagree. There are *millions* of perfectly fine machines that don't have the extended instruction sets.
I have 2 under my desk at work, 2 ghz 2gb ram. Id not call that garbage. Neither have a newer chip.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately, while this is a long overdue solution that other companies have used fine before, but it's going to prove problematic for Microsoft. Things that won't work (and Joe User will try to do anyway):
1.) Install their XP-compatible Antivirus program. "It said on the Windows 7 box that I could run old programs!"
2.) Install a printer which works on XP only. "The printer box said it works on Windows. Why can I only print from some programs (the older ones seem to work)?"
3.) Play an old game at reasonable speed. "I installed Super Hardware Killer Shooter for Windows XP and the 3D is running really slow!"
Virtualization is a great thing. I use it work all the time and love it. The public doesn't quite "get it" yet. They're going to see some things work, some things not and wonder why the hell that is. It happened when Apple moved to OS X, but the user base was much smaller so the complaints were less.
Until someone creates a hypervisor which is presented in a completely transparent way to the OS, in that things difficult to virtualize (e.g. video card hardware) run at normal speeds, it's just going to appear to the user "every time I run an old program, either it's too slow or it doesn't work".
... one of the drawbacks of the WIndows platform - from an development and engineering point of view - is that it's backwards compatible all the way back to (if I'm not mistaken) Windows 1.0. That's an insane codebase to be dealing with. By bundling an XP VM with Win7, they can- for the first time - take the backwards compatibility crap out of Windows and concentrate on providing a stable OS. Isn't that essentially what Apple did with the transition from 68000 series chips to PowerPC, from OS 9.x to OS 10, and then again from Power PC to Intel? I've believed this was a necessity for quite a while. D
While I agree with your observation regarding making a "break" in the code by providing a virtualized "backwards-compatible" environment, what the hell is the reason the codebase IS compatible all the way to Windows 1.0?!?
When a company says "we're no longer going to support Windows 3x or Win9x, they should MEAN IT. NO support for the software. NO support for the hardware. This would be like me walking into the Ford dealership and demanding to know why they no longer "support" my 1978 F-150 for parts.
Rather ironic that Microsoft seemed to learn the "tough shit, upgrade" customer approach when it came to deploying Vista (hardware requirements), yet their software will still run Office 95. At some point, you've got to cut BOTH cords.
So does this mean M$ will be extending the fully supported period for XP again, as it will be shipping with W7?
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Amusingly, BG2 works perfectly in the 7 beta. I even have it running with Baldur's Gate Trilogy without any problems. I agree that 7's compatibility with anything non-vista is horribly awful, but BG2 thankfully works.
This would be great if Microsoft included a friendly P2V tool like platespin or vconverter. Then when people buy a new PC, it becomes short work to P2V their old XP system into a VM sitting inside their new system. A lot of people hate to upgrade for fear of losing their old files and settings.
I think companies are more likely to depend on old software that runs only on XP. So they target the correct users indeed.
Most non-corporate users only use programs to browse the tubes, print documents, send email and view photo's, nothing that depends on XP :)
Do not forget gamers/power users. I loathe the fact that I need a killer machine, to run a killer OS, to run Call of duty about at the same Frame per second rate as my old machine, with a few bells and whistles involved that I do not care particularly about.I'd end up paying 1.000 bucks on hardware, 250 on OS, and 50 on the game just to stay where I am now.
One other consideration is that these strategy of enabling XPsp3 in windows 7 will surely put some noses out of joint, plus leaving the door open for interesting legal questions. Imagine this scenario: in an all win XP sp3 outfit, the company buys half a dozen copies of win7. are these particular associated copies of XP officially supported while all the legacy copies aren't?
Remember: if a company has a particular, mission critical application that runs in XP, and this application is "good enough/fast enough" as is, the requirement of the company is "cheap xp machines with xp installed", NOT "rich win 7 machines with win7 plus a virtual machine with XP", if only because cost of hardware goes up. Given the low price of entry level hardware these days, the OS is representing a bigger slice of the pie than previously, so pressure there is higher. I would not be surprised if somebody did a "spoiling attack" claiming that all this design is a win7 tax and demanding to be able to buy legitimate XP copies....at old win xp prices.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I know a few people who are really well connected in Fortune 500 IT circles, and they tell me to a man that *NOBODY* is planning to move to Vista or 7 (by which they mean *NOBODY* running a very large corporate IT enterprise). They tend to have corporate security models including stations locked down in various ways that work, deployment models that work, drive reimaging procedures that work, standard desktops and toolsets that work, and legacy code that works, much of which DOESN'T work in Vista or 7. This is the reason you can still get an XP box -- MS keeps raising the bar for it, but corporate just keeps paying the freight. So this is MS next move, to try to slide these guys into 7 by letting them virtualize their XP model.
The problem is that while this will solve some of the IT guys' problems (legacy apps, desktops, maybe security model) it will not solve what is probably the most important problem to some of them, deployment and drive reimaging. Also depending on how easy it is to break out of the emulation sandbox, they may not be happy with the security model either. When you are talking about pretty much rebuilding a network with 100,000 machines, paying an extra couple of hundred in blackmail per box for MS to let you keep using what you know works makes a lot more sense than jumping off into the void. MS may overcome some of the corporate reluctance with this ploy, particularly at smaller companies, but I don't think it's going to crack the egg they need to crack.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Didn't apple do this with OSX? You can run OS9 apps, but it is in a VM.
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
The U.S. Military is heavily invested in several applications that have been tested at Microsoft. (Military members do have offices in Redmond for this purpose.) Windows 7 was shown to have some issues. The USN scrapped plans to move to Vista, planned for this quarter, and decided to wait for Windows 7, but needed XP compatibility. The VM compromise was brewed up.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Probably the best enterprise marketing decision that MS has made in years...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
What good is a rootkit in a VM? It'll be open just as long as the user needs to open some legacy app, won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily and may or may not have internet access.
Running Windows in a VM is actually the ideal solution. Do all your net connected stuff via a secure OS like Linux, then open up a few ports for the VM to run games or whatever.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Education users would KILL for a Win9X VM in
windows 7. A lot of educational applications had to be "retired" because XP wouldnt run them in a secure mode. Educators use good programs until they dont run anymore a lot of programs from 10-15 years ago children in K-2 classrooms still enjoy but wont run on XP.
In many cases (especially if virtualization is used):
:).
root in virtual machine + bug in your CPU and/or bug in vm software = root in host machine.
Apparently there is an exploitable bug in intel processors. The "offsets" for the exploit might change depending on the motherboard you are using. So you better not be using a popular motherboard
Seems more like a way to do what Apple did with OS9 (aka 'classic') on OSX. Hopefully, they used the chance to remove as much back-compatibility cruft as they could, too.
Rubbish, my PC (built for the equivalent of about $500 (over 2 years ago - granted I upgraded the GPU last year but that would have only added another $100 after replacing the old one) and it runs Vista perfectly fine including all the latest games.
This whole thing about having to spend a fortune on hardware for vista is BS. You do NOT need to a 'killer' machine to run a 'killer' OS as you so put it.
Granted it took a while for the graphics drivers for games to mature properly to the point of being similar to XP, but that happened a while ago, and on any modern (and not necessarily expensive PC), the performance difference will be minimal between Vista/7 and XP.
"Apple called from the year 2000 and wants their legacy transition strategy back"
IBM called from 1992 with OS/2 2.x onwards. ;)
I run XP in VirtualBox on a Debian testing host workstation. Stable, secure, and the only time it can contribute to my security risks is during the hour or two a week I run it. (my Eudora mail client runs in Crossover Office)
As for the performance hit, the way to deal with that is simply to run a faster processor. Though even in virtualization, remember that XP was designed for processors a lot slower than anything you'll see in a modern computer.
M$ being willing to put virtualization in their OS gave them the opportunity to switch their host OS to a secure, stable, and efficient *nix (even with their religious adherence to proprietary OSs, they could have bought SCO unix or licensed AIX)... they could have ported their flagship apps to a native *nix environment while using XP as a legacy compatibility layer. The result might have been unstoppable.
Happily for the rest of us (except for the unfortunates running Windows as a primary OS)... they chose otherwise.
Tech Public Policy stuff
won't have access to their file system, except what documents they choose to copy over temporarily
Not true on any VM I've seen.
VirtualBox only gives the guest access to the virtual drive and to host directories that you manually configure as "shared", which then need to be "mapped" (i.e. you have to push "map network drive" under windoze and type the right thing.). Since the system sees these directories as servers (i.e. they are assigned their own drive letters), there is no way for the system to represent the notion of the parent directory of a "shared" host directory, or indeed to know that such a thing is applicable (read: .==..~=[D-Z]:\ for such directories as far as the guest is concerned), so how do you expect the virus/rootkit/what-have-you to get out of the box you've put it in?
$ make available
Didn't we just have an article about a CPU hack which enables attacker to take over the whole system even from VM as long as the attacker gets root/admin access? I could be wrong though because the article went way over my head.
You don't know what you don't know.
First, my comment about how fast Win 7 is on older hardware is NOT from MS, but from people who have installed the Win 7 beta on 3-5 year old LAPTOPS and been amazed at how fast it was.
Second, I HAVE run Linux in a VM on XP and that was on a crappy 1.5 GHz processor with only half a gig of ram 7 years ago. Surprisingly, it actually didn't run all that slow. It definitely wasn't the fastest, but again -- half a gig of ram, so after I gave Linux 256 MB to run on, I only had the minimum specs for ram on XP left.
I run only Linux on my laptop and only Windows on my desktop (the desktop is for gaming). Until game companies start supporting Linux (or some billionaire gives a massive donation to the WINE team for them to go into hyperspeed), I'll always have to have a copy of Windows. Win 7 64-bit actually IS good. It runs just about every program I've thrown at it, sometimes with a work around (Icewind Dale has to be run in windowed mode or you get some weird graphics glitches that make the game nauseating to play). It looks good, the new taskbar is actually very handy as well as very clean looking, and it's fast. With the virtual XP in it, Win 7 64-bit should run every last bit of software I own without a hitch (anything old enough to not run right has low enough requirements that my gaming rig won't be affected by it). Face it, Microsoft is actually making something worth buying for once. Quit whining and accept it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson