I think the motivation for this is to be found in a new behaviour in win2k and an already announced intention.
Win2k allows each "application" to have private versions of shared libaries, ie to improve overall reliability and resilience by not allowing applications to update common files.
However if 20 apps install private versions of the same shared library, disk space would dwindle to nothing very soon.
So this appears to be a scheme to allow apps to have "seperate" links to common libaries. So if a new version of an app updates a libary for compatability reasons, that copy is not imposed on all of the other apps in the system. Essentialy the linkage is "branched" when the opdated libary is written onto the link.
The real inovation here is'nt the linkage, or even that fact that it uses a low priority daemon to perform the linkage.
Its the way the scheduling of that daemon is performed that is interesting.
MS has recognised that low priority I/O intensive tasks like disk scanners often impact system performance heavily, becuase the task scheduler see's the task as a low resource task, becuase it is consuming only small amounts of CPU, Even though it may be generating a large load on the disk system.
Digging deep into this announcement you will find references to a new scheduling system, that uses task progress and I/O resource consumption as the metric for selecting runnable tasks. Simple selection systems based on CPU priority, dont cut it here. The system is called "MS Manners" and is used to ensure that the consolidation daemon does not impact the users use of the machine. So MS may have found a way of stopping "index server" and "fastfind" from turning the disk system into a skating rink and clogging up the I/O channel.
I think there are elements of merit here, its all to easy to see the word "symlink" and make assumptions about what is being proposed.
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I think the motivation for this is to be found in a new behaviour in win2k and an already announced intention.
Win2k allows each "application" to have private versions of shared libaries, ie to improve overall reliability and resilience by not allowing applications to update common files.
However if 20 apps install private versions of the same shared library, disk space would dwindle to nothing very soon.
So this appears to be a scheme to allow apps to have "seperate" links to common libaries. So if a new version of an app updates a libary for compatability reasons, that copy is not imposed on all of the other apps in the system. Essentialy the linkage is "branched" when the opdated libary is written onto the link.
The real inovation here is'nt the linkage, or even that fact that it uses a low priority daemon to perform the linkage.
Its the way the scheduling of that daemon is performed that is interesting.
MS has recognised that low priority I/O intensive tasks like disk scanners often impact system performance heavily, becuase the task scheduler see's the task as a low resource task, becuase it is consuming only small amounts of CPU, Even though it may be generating a large load on the disk system.
Digging deep into this announcement you will find references to a new scheduling system, that uses task progress and I/O resource consumption as the metric for selecting runnable tasks. Simple selection systems based on CPU priority, dont cut it here. The system is called "MS Manners" and is used to ensure that the consolidation daemon does not impact the users use of the machine. So MS may have found a way of stopping "index server" and "fastfind" from turning the disk system into a skating rink and clogging up the I/O channel.
I think there are elements of merit here, its all to easy to see the word "symlink" and make assumptions about what is being proposed.