Comment by walki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walki | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the NT kernel is in maintenance only mode and will eventually be replaced by the Linux kernel. I submitted a Windows kernel bug to Microsoft a few years ago and even though they acknowledged the bug the issue was closed as a "won't fix" because fixing the bug would require making backwards incompatible changes.

Windows currently has a significant scaling issue because of its Processor Groups design, it is actually more of an ugly hack that was added to Windows 7 to support more than 64 threads. Everyone makes bad decisions when developing a kernel, the difference between the Windows NT kernel and the Linux kernel is that fundamental design flaws tend to get eventually fixed in the Linux kernel while they rarely get fixed in the Windows NT kernel.

NT kernel still gets improvements. Think IoRing (copy of io_uring, but for file reads only) which is a new feature.

I think things like Credential Guard, various virtualization (security-related, not VM-related) are relatively new kernel-integrated features, etc.

Kernel bugs that need to exist because of backwards compat are going to continue to exist since backwards compat is a design goal of Windows.

I have the same feeling

Windows is more and more based on virtualization

And the other hand, more and more microsoft stuff is Linux native

It would not surprise me if Linux runs every windows, somewhere far deep, in the next decades

More hybridations are probably coming, but where will it stop ? And why ?

I think rumours of NT's terminal illness have been greatly exaggerated. There are numerous new developments I am hearing about from it, like the adoption of RCU and the memory partitions.

It's not clear to me how processor groups inhibit scaling. It's even sensible to constrict the movement of threads willy-nilly between cores in a lot of cases (because of NUMA locality, caches, etc.) And it looks like there's an option to not confine your program to a single processor group, too.

Running all NT applications in a virtualization layer over top of the Linux kernel would surely impose a performance penalty, and for what, so that someone can run high-performance Linux applications on Windows? It's a bewildering line of reasoning, to be sure.

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