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Comment by ntauthority | Hacker News Reader

It's a different composition, this seems to be a derivative of some 'CloudCore' product used internally with Azure, with layered compositions affectionately named 'run levels' (the full GUI boot also known as ClientCore is apparently '3', but '2' would be a console-only boot like Nano Server).

There's an interesting 'hello and enjoy' text file left in here describing this run level:

               HELLO!
  
  The OS is booted to RunLevel 3 (CLIENTCORE).
  
  Services are STARTED at this run level.
  
  All OneCore compliant apps can run.
  GUI apps (that depend on user32 and gdi only) can run.
  
  Run 'memstat' to see memory usage.
  Run 'tlist -s' to see running processes and services.
  
  'njoy.

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The previous version of this, Factory OS, ran all of the Win32 apps in a microVM (which was the planned functionality for Windows 10X), while UWP apps could run natively. I wonder if this does something similar or if that was dropped.

(I spent some time trying to figure out how the VM is created to see if something like that could be done in regular Windows, but much of it is undocumented. Being able to only run one Windows Sandbox at a time in regular Windows kills some of my workflows.)

FactoryOS is from an entirely different set of compositions (composable core/WCOS, meant to reduce the amount of MobileCore-based SKUs) which was meant for a few new products (10X, HubOS, Andromeda) that never really shipped and got changed around and canceled numerous times. It is curious, however, as to why there is no WSK released for the 'Nickel' release of Windows (with build 22621 as final), and instead we got this image dropped instead.

The VM was rather an image of a similar composition to this one (ContainerOS shares some component roots) running in the Host Compute Service which actually is properly documented nowadays after a while of only being partially documented in Docker for Windows code: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/api/hcs/over...

Okay, that's hilarious; did MS intentionally recreate sysv service management, or did they independently arrive at the same place with the same name?

By 'affectionately named', I rather think someone thought it sounded cool to name it such. Perhaps CloudCore proper allows 'upgrading' a running system to the 'Win3' composition in case one would want to run GUI diagnostics, but other than that the run level terminology doesn't mean much as it's rather a distinction made at image staging time.

init.d is back, baby! Windows is certified SystemD-free :D

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