Microsoft Works On Windows For ARM-Based Servers

SmartAboutThings writes According to some reports from the industry, Microsoft is working on a version of its software for servers that run on chips based on ARM Holdings's technology. Windows Server now runs on Intel hardware, but it seems that Redmond wants to diversify its strategy. An ARM-based version of Windows Server could help challenge Intel's dominance and make a place for ARM in the server market, not only in mobile chips. According to the article, though, Microsoft "hasn’t yet decided whether to make the software commercially available."

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Re:Microsoft Works?

[cbhacking]

The only really stupid aspect of the Windows-on-Arm (AKA Windows RT) product line was the intentionally crippling it to only be able to run stuff signed by MS. Take out that restriction, and it's actually pretty decent: full web browser (to which Firefox and Chrome and all could have been ported, although - speaking as somebody who tried porting Chrome - that doesn't mean it would be easy), full file management, built-in "root" (just a standard UAC prompt), multi-user support, scripting capability (all the standard Windows languages), built-in Office and Remote Desktop software, ability to use Windows networking (SMB), updates from MS rather than from some OEM that may or may not bother to push important patches or so on, and a bunch of other nice stuff. Combine that with the inability to join domains (a purely artificial restriction, as they didn't even take out the domain-client code; hack the registry a bit and it will happily join domains) and you had something that nobody really wanted

As soon as it was jailbroken, a bunch of useful stuff - ranging from 7-Zip to DOSBox to Python - was ported over. Additionally, anything that was pure .NET, or .NET with P/Invoke of functions from built-in OS libraries, ran without so much as a recompile. The problem was the need to jailbreak (and then the absurd level of effort that MS went to with 8.1 to break the jailbreak). That meant that commercial developers never ported their stuff to RT (all the community-ported apps are open source), and there was no software ecosystem outside of the joke of the Windows Store. One guy, in his spare time, wrote a surprisingly decent x86 emulation layer that could run a reasonable amount of old Wintel software as-is; pay him to do it as his full-time job and it could have run anything that wasn't simply too performance-intensive for the dynamic recompilation on low-powered CPUs.

So, with that said, an "RT Server" could be pretty useful... if MS didn't go all brain-dead on third party software again. Not a lot of point running a web server that can't run PHP or Java or even ASP.NET to host web applications, these days. File serving is fine as long as you stick to SMB, assuming it can also join a domain and do all the standard Win Server stuff with volume management, I guess.