MS Suggests Using Shims For XP-To-Win7 Transition

eldavojohn writes "Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser. Vista & Windows 7 have fixed that and implemented The Correct Paradigm. But what about the pre-Vista applications written to utilize superuser privileges? How do you migrate them forward? Well, running a virtualized instance of XP in Windows 7 is an option we've talked about. But Microsoft is pushing the idea of using 'shims,' which are a way to bypass or trick the code into thinking it's still running as user/superuser mode in Windows XP. This is an old trick that Microsoft has often employed, and it has brought the Windows kernel a long ways, in a duct-tape sort of fashion. At the TechEd conference in LA, Microsoft associate software architect Chris Jackson joked, 'If you walk too loudly down the hall near the [Windows] kernel developers, you'll break 20 to 30 apps.' So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, shims are your suggested solution."

Comments

Security flaw?

[RichardJenkins]

Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser

No way! Really? Next you'll be telling me you can't switch to another virtual console if your GUI crashes, or review the OS code to satisfy yourself it's not malicious.

Re:I know you slashdotters hate to hear it

[je ne sais quoi]

I don't dispute that most apps designed for older versions of windows run okay on newer versions, but you haven't given any evidence at all as to why this might be true. Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades (e.g., nethack is from 1985). Also, often apps that runs on OS X can run on any version of OS X but there were some changes between point releases but I don't know of an app that fails to run on new versions. Also, the X11 server lets you run any linux or unix program that uses that as well. If you have an app that runs on OS 9, you can run that in classic mode (which I believe they stopped including for leopard, but I'm not sure), and that takes us back to 1999. Finally, I have all kinds of DOS or windows 3.11 apps that don't run well or at all on windows any more, even in emulation mode. We also used to have some kind of VB app that only ran on windows 95 and refused to run on anything else. Most of these are scientific software packages for driving instruments or interfacing with specific hardware, but not always.

I know you windows fanboys hate to hear it, but contrary to being perfect, windows does break backwards compatibility sometimes with new releases, AND there are other operating systems that achieve similar or greater (in the case of linux) backwards compatibility to their predecessors.