Windows 7: The truth about MinWin: the heart of Windows 7

more at The truth about MinWin: the heart of Windows 7 | News | TechRadar UK

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Microsoft agrees: Windows is a "really large bloated operating system"

While newly minted Windows head Steven Sinofsky continues to play his cards close to his chest, we're seeing signs that Microsoft is rethinking its monolithic approach to not only the mass-market Windows operating system but the entire family of Windows products from servers down to CE-based embedded devices.
First up is a streamlined microkernel codenamed MinWin, around which a re-engineered Windows line will be built. Described as "the Windows 7 source-code base", in reference to the successor to Windows Vista which is slated for a 2010 release, MinWin strips back the current NT-based kernel to the barest of bare metal.

"We'll be using this internally to build all the products based on Windows" said Microsoft engineer Eric Traut, when he slipped the first public glimpse of MinWin into a demonstration of Microsoft's virtualisation technology at the University of Illinois last week.
After loading multiple versions of Windows from the original 1.0 release through to NT 4 - including Windows ‘Bob' which earned a few chuckles from the audience and which Traut described as "not necessarily Microsoft's proudest moment!" - Traut fired up an additional VM session to load MinWin, which he called "the core of Windows 7, the Windows 7 source-code base". Microsoft agrees: Windows is a "really large bloated operating system"

so .... is THAT the little 100MB partition Windows 7 make's during install?
or is that just a severely dumb question?

nope but its actually the closest we will get to it (actually it reminds me of singularity and the web version of Server 08 and R2..)
as winmin is a fully self sufficient OS (where it does not call anything other that itself, meaning its more modular and easier to patch (less spaghetti code to me...)

anything in orange is part of minwin and anything in green are the "extras" that we usually see in consumer OS's, it seems closer to a Server OS with nothing other that a command line interface...

When 7 was first being mentioned some time back there was mention of a new file indexing system. Once the betas came out the thing noticed then was the based on content. The overall changes are what you notice when comparing XP and Vista to 7 are noticible like seeing 7 installed in 20-25minutes while actually larger in size?

I thought that was called Linux.

Cheers
jimbo

no os wars here...
reminds me of windows 3.11 actually (it was using a dos core and the windows extesion was running on top of it...)
this is the core of windows...
you cannot get any deeper and still have a functional system...
you can with linux distro also break down to the most essential parts of the OS (much easier actually)... like the many Unix/Linux Servers on the net...

Line who? Anyone by that name? The last time I saw anything like that it was some live cd I used to see the 32bit RC installed on a friend's machine! He know sees an XP/7 dual boot! There wasn't any ? strange file names coming up either!

Hi there
I use and LIKE Windows 7 so its not an OS war.

The design of Linux is based (like older "Classical OS" design) on having a "Protected" smallish kernel to provide the main system services and then other functionality is loaded as and when required such as Modules for hardware drivers and GUI's ( The whole GUI system in Linux is run via a generic "X-Server" module which then loads up the "Window Maker" of your choice such as GNOME, KDE. XFCE etc.

Even the file system is "modular" . If the kernel has support for the relevant file system then you can use it. It's actually even more generic now as the main file system driver is based on the "FUSE" support which allows read and write to a very large number of file systems including NTFS.

Linux basically was a Unix derivative - so the whole idea of a GUI was an added afterthought - but because of the modular nature of the OS could be implemented without a fundamental re-design of the OS.

Windows on the other hand was designed as a GUI from the start which makes it rather difficult to change almost anything without re-writing the whole system.

There probably is a lot in Windows that people could do without in some cases but since in any case the GUI is 100% linked with the OS it will need a major re-fit to slim it down a lot.

Also Linux has a lot of open source components which is why optimising it is a lot simpler to do than in Windows -- the disadvantage here in Linux is that there are almost as many different distributions as there are native plants on the planet. This means that you can't always ensure your hardware will work on different distros.

So

"You pays your money and takes your choice".


Cheers
jimbo

in a sense yes and no...
yes in that the linux gui was a afterthought (and that is where its suffering the most..)
and no in the fact that its a smallish kernel...
the fundamental concept of the linux kernel is by design monolithic
while yes its made in modules and so its a hybrid monolithic kernel but it still carries the monolithic design
actually windows was a gui or a shell extension if say to DOS...
so you are correct...



actually it takes alot know how to *optimize* components such as the kernel...
while yes you can always have the posibilty of doing it there a lot to be learned if want to accomplish such feat...
so yes its out there but not everyone (even in the linux world) can understand it..