Microsoft’s Midori OS

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MicrosoftThe SDTimes has an article up about a new operating system Microsoft is working on called “Midori”. It is based on their “Singularity” OS, with everything being written in managed code then natively compiled.  Rumor has it that this is the follow-on to the Windows platform… we’ll see if it ever materializes commercially. SDTimes bases the article on some internal documents they got access to, which may be why we haven’t seen this level of detail before (see the entry in Wikipedia). From the article:

According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

…operating system services, such as storage, would either be provided to the applications by the OS or be discovered across a trusted distributed environment.

Read the rest…

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel

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Here are some links to 3 great articles by Mark Russinovich about new features in the Windows Vista kernel (Ntoskrnl.exe).

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 1

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 3