Driss-A-Blog

Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.

No way. With Win98 and WinME, all disk access and many other system calls still went through DOS. For NT they wrote a program called cmd that implements a command-line. Just because the prompt is "C:\>" doesn't mean it's DOS. There have been people who wrote a DOS-like shell for the Mac. Does that make the Mac be based on DOS?

Windows XP is not an operating system. It is a windowing system that sits atop an operating system much as KDE or Gnome sit atop Linux.

Every operating system is layered. On Mac OS X, the UI sits upon a kernel. There are APIs to talk to the kernel, and APIs to talk to the OS. Any decently engineered OS is like this, and as much as I dislike Windows, I have no doubt that it's decently-well engineered.

Now back to Microsoft putting Windows on top of Linux. Linux is better, faster, stronger than whatever is living underneath XP now, right?

Excuse me? Is there any evidence supporting this claim? Just because you say it's so doesn't make it. I remember reading that the XP kernel is "fully pre-emptible, fully-interuptible, and re-entrant by design". I have no reason to disbelieve this statement. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into the kernel. There is no good basis for this statement.

Performance would improve.

Whoa. By moving the top layers of Windows from a kernel explicitly built for it onto a kernel that wasn't explicitly designed with it in mind, you are going to gain speed? Wow. Big leap there, Cringe.

As Mike Class points out, by not having to develop its own OS, Microsoft could also save money. They wouldn't need however many people are presently devoted to maintaining the underlying OS that isn't supposed to be there.

Two problems here.

First, even though MS wouldn't need the team to develop it, they still would need a maintenance team, plus a team to integrate new features that they would need. Second, you now would need to spend an obscene amount of money to port the upper layers over to the new kernel and then test it all. This is not a money-saving proposition.

Apple has made a virtue of doing exactly this with MacOS-X, heralding its Mach kernel and BSD roots.

First people wanted Apple to drop the Mach kernel in favor of the Linux kernel, and now Apple's use of the Mach kernel is used to support a similar argument for MS? This is a weird world.

No one but Apple uses the Mach kernel. Not for any real operating systems, anyway. Apple isn't leveraging the open source community for the Mach kernel; there is no dedicated Mach community feverishly working on newer kernel versions. Apple has their own kernel team, and is very much like Microsoft in that regard. The fact that Apple releases the kernel source doesn't affect that argument. As for BSD, since Apple's not using a BSD kernel but just a lot of BSD kernel-space code, Apple once again has to provide a lot of engineering effort. This partially supports the argument as to the leverage, but it doesn't save them a ton of money.

Then look at what this does to Microsoft's anti-trust situation. Suddenly, they aren't this overbearing monolith, but just another company pushing a windowing system and apps.

...who still would have 90% percent of the market and would have no problem bullying people around. Changing the kernel would change nothing about that.

It would also have a negative impact on their language business, though that's not an absolute certainty.

Why? What does the kernel have to do with the compilers? Compilers compile to the CPU's language, and any kernel calls would have to follow whatever the relevant ABIs are.

The part I love, though, is the idea of Bill Gates showing up at LinuxWorld to kiss Linus's ring.

Geez, Cringe. Go live in your fantasy world. Thanks for the interesting view into it, though.