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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, to anyone working on Windows kernel development, at what point does a feature/scheduler improvement become so good that people decide "nah, this is way too cool to put in Windows Home Edition, let's feature-gate it to the enterprise version instead!"?

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This is actually something I find Microsoft does poorly for enthusiasts (both the crowd buying these types of chips, but also who care about a scheduler). They have VERY low visibility into these types of improvements.

I can find a billion blog posts about notepad supporting Linux and Windows line returns. I struggle to find anything about improvements for new hardware.

I wish there was a blog (albeit unfashionable these days) or similar which told these stories. I often feel the lack of their existence is a taint on data driven decisions: these customers are likely insignificant, but their influence on others is significant (even if their advice isn’t “buy a 64 core CPU”, it will be “Windows 10 is great, use that!”).

I’ve largely been a MSFT fanboy since a young age, and I kind of get being mainstream, but tossing a bone to the enthusiastic supporters would be nice.

Linus Tech Tips started as a vlog, and is fairly popular.

They called out this problem between Threadripper 3990X and Windows 10 a bit ago.

It was good. Love Linus.

This was his video on the 3990X recently for those interested: https://youtu.be/1LaKH5etJoE

I guess it depends on their segmentation strategy. If you have not read it already there is a great article by Joel Spolsky on this topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

In this case it seems pretty justified to include this feature in the enterprise edition only.

Also relevant is this article (which links to that one) by Jeff Atwood: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

The problem is that there is no easy way for somebody to pay more to access this feature. You have to jump through hoops to buy it and you probably won't even get official support. Meanwhile the alternative to Windows doesn't cost anything monetarily. But at the end of the day, both of these aren't important factors yet. It's mostly a question of what OS the application you bought this CPU for runs on (or runs better on - Blender). The hardware is still expensive enough that people won't buy hardware like this "at random", but this is likely to change quickly.

Great. How do I, a sole proprietor, buy this "enterprise edition?"

Sign up for a Microsoft small business account. Via that, you get a MSDN (or whatever they call it these days) subscription. Then you can download any version of the OS and get a license key from the same webpage to activate it.

While you can download it from MSDN, and it will activate, check your licenses. In most cases, these licenses are intended for development and it is forbidden to use them in production.

In the past, you weren't allowed to use MSDN distributions for everyday business purposes. Is that no longer the case?

Any chance you have a link to this offering? Not seeing MSDN being listed as included with anything buyable.

Apologies, it seems the program was discontinued in 2018. Lookup details on Microsoft’s BizSpark program for more info.

This program replaced it, but I have zero info besides knowing it replaced BizSpark so might not be comparable:

https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/

Not sure if this is what the poster above was referencing, but here's an offering: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/

On ebay for $10.

Ah, yes, the Virus Of The Month club.

Have you ever had that actually occur to you with software bought on eBay that's non-physical?

I've bought numerous Windows 7 and a couple of Windows 10 keys, plus a few MS Office keys, never had any issues.

Sometimes, the keys would require phone activation, but that was ages ago. Nowdays they just work.

The providers give you a key that you can use to activate, and a link for the ISO, but that part is optional. The keys work with untouched ISOs, too. FWIW, I once downloaded the seller's ISO and compared the hashes, and they matched up.

I may have to add, I live in Germany, which is part of the EU, and the courts here have decided key resale is completely legal and MS has to tolerate it.

["Volume license software may be sold individually"]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

[original]: https://www.golem.de/news/bgh-urteil-software-aus-volumenliz...

Virus in the product key? That's something incredible.

True, I was thinking of software distributed on DVDs or ISOs.

A stolen or misappropriated product key is almost as bad as a virus, though. It will work great... but only at first, until Microsoft notices that 50,000 customers are using it.

I bet on some level they know and don't care. If you're buying a cheapo key off of ebay then chances are you were never going to pay the full price. Meanwhile they're still using the software, learning how it works, and growing the Windows ecosystem further. Vaguely like a loss-leader that gets people in the door.

> I'm curious, to anyone working on Windows kernel development, at what point does a feature/scheduler improvement become so good that people decide

A kernel developer is going to be 3-4 steps removed from those decisions. In many ways they are just a consumer of a product like this too and work on their subsystem. They are unlikely to be worried because it's the product they build and might even feel that it's inexpensive for the level of engineering they invest.

I wish I could see a statistic on the number of people that would have bought Win 10 Home to run on their 64 core machine if only it had support for 64 cores!

It's going to happen soon. AmD's high end consumer model is already very close to that number. When these become commonplace, say in 8 years, someone might find something fun or productive to do with 64 cores, and it's gonna suck if your OS is the bottleneck.

> When these become commonplace, say in 8 years

Someone is going to run an OS from 2020 on a brand new machine in an age where 64 threads is common place ?

These things get segmented according to market - home is tailored to suit commonplace.

You mean all those people still running Windows 7 in 2020?

On modern computers ?

By the time it happens MS will support it in Home edition. I remember that Win2000 for example supported something like 2 or 4 CPUs in standard edition and you had to buy server editions or even datacenter edition for more.

Probably. Once upon a time I hit the ram limit for Windows 7 Home of 16GB.

Then 8 jumped to 128GB.

Buy a 64-core processor and futureproof against the coming 64-core Windows

It's not necessarily "so good" especially for workstation loads vs server loads. You have the same issue in Linux with the different config options (a simple example that's not relevant anymore: an smp kernel is slower than a single core one)

Yes, it could be a config option as well instead of a fixed choice.

> (a simple example that's not relevant anymore: an smp kernel is slower than a single core one)

The main reason this example is not relevant anymore is the "alternatives" system Linux uses nowadays, which dynamically patches the kernel code according to the hardware features (in this case, it detects it's running on a single core and removes the SMP locking code).

I remember reading in Inside Windows 2000 by Mark Russinovich & David Solomon that the non-SMP kernel was the exact same binary built from the exact same SMP-compliant code with all the SMP stuff NOP-ed out.

Just pirate Windows Enterprise

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