Going Deep Inside Vista's Kernel Architecture 478
bariswheel wrote to mention an episode of 'Going Deep' on Channel 9 which takes a hard look at the architecture of Windows Vista. From the post: "Rob Short is the corporate vice president in charge of the team that architects the foundation of Windows Vista. This is a fascinating conversation with the kernel architecture team. It's our Christmas present to all of the Niners out there who've stuck with us day after day. This is a very candid interview." Topics discussed include the history of the Windows Registry, and the security/reliability of Microsoft's upcoming operating system.
For those of us without speakers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that a word? (Score:1, Insightful)
"architects"? Is that even a word?
Please, kill the registry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fix whats there! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you already paid for WinXP, why the hell should you have to pay AGAIN for the "security" that was supposed to be there...and in 2k, NT4, yadda yadda yadda?
Re:Please, kill the registry... (Score:5, Insightful)
That will also make applications easier to port. Something Microsoft doesn't want. Registry is a good lock-in tool for Microsoft.
Re:Fix whats there! (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses would never accept this kind of qualty from, for example, partners, suppliers, and so on...
Businesses in all markets accept this kind of quality from their suppliers and partners all the time. They don't like it, they scream about it, they change relationships because of it, but don't think that problems of the same scale don't constantly occur in businesses generally. I say this as someone who spent five years in plastic housewares manufacturing. Technology is not unique at all in this respect.
Re:Please, kill the registry... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How deep did they go? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You name it, they've probably been there. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why I always skip all these "new Windows release" articles - they're pap. Usually just alot of mouth breathing over widgets and rather pedestrian implementations of mundane technology. Boring, and not very informative. Keeps alot of boring writers in jobs, though. Microsoft is like a 5 year jobs program for "IT Professional" writers that otherwise don't know their ass from their hat.
Re:MMS stream hails from microsoft.com!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if this MSDN interview of an MS executive on future MS technology is somehow MS related.
Re:You name it, they've probably been there. (Score:5, Insightful)
mnb Re:Please, kill the registry... (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you really think you can get modded insightful? Your well reasoned and well documented factual post has nothing on a simpleminded (and factually incorrect )Microsoft attack by someone who didn't even post about the article in question!
But honestly, this is a true test of the moderation system. Your point is based in fact and deserves a higher score than the GP post's tirade based on incorrect assumptions.
We'll see.
Re:You name it, they've probably been there. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:3, Insightful)
With most old applications, I could simply copy the root directory onto another computer, and it would work fine. As apps started using the registry more often, this sometimes became impossible; programs would just refuse to work because they couldn't find the registry entries they needed. (Games are especially bad, as they often keep CD keys in the registry.) I can see why the registry could be useful, but in practice it (or perhaps just how programmers have used it) has caused me quite a lot of hassle.
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's It?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I managed an early Y2K program back in 1998 where we moved a network from 486/Win3.11/Novell to 586/NT4.0/NT Server. We didn't put removable media in the machines & didn't give Administrative rights to anyone. I wandered around the facility recently to find dozens of those ugly beige box clones still going. Thus happy to see NT kernel continuing in Vista (whenever that may happen...)
Re:Where is the news? (Score:2, Insightful)
"old news" would be an oxymoron.
"recent news" is redundant.
Re:Where is the news? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's It?? (Score:4, Insightful)
See Also:
Windows 95
Windows NT 3.1
Paragons of stability and perfect programming without a single bug all thanks to throwing everything out and starting over.
Re:OS/2 failed because OS/2 didn't work well enoug (Score:3, Insightful)
Even ethics and the law?
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Windows Registry in Windows NT systems is a database-like construct, with sort-of transactions. They even have access control lists to manage security - keys can be made writeable only by some users, etc. Some registry files ("hives") contain security information and are not readable by normal filesystem utilities (access-denied on open(); though this is not registry-specific :) ).
Think of it like using mysql or sqlite database to store and manage system configuration instead of bunch of config files - it's NOT a bad idea.
(I'm not attacking the config-file approach, just saying that having a convenient standardised interface to config data across all applications is a Good Thing).
Um...isn't vista simply rehashed NT 3.x? (Score:2, Insightful)
However, once I got my beta of XP (NT 5.1) I was sorely dissapointed when the ntoskrnl.exe and other nt*.exe and nt*.dll files (I forget exactly what they are named.) had similar architecture and functions to the same ntoskrnl.exe files in NT 3.1, which I recall running like a dog on my DX/66 (particularly compared to OS/2 2.0 which ran great).
Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You name it, they've probably been there. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:3, Insightful)
And roaming profiles are a *good* idea because... ???
The more meta-data you can link up to individual files, the better you can network those individual files. The problem is that Windows is an explosion of little files, with an explosion of configuration files, with an explosion of proprietary databases, with an explosion of special directories on top. It's a fracking mess, and roaming profiles is a band-aid.
No other PC GUI system came up with such a poor design. (Yeah, X-Windows was a mess too. But it was a controlled mess intended for *cough* "Professionals".) BeOS, Amiga, RiscOS, Mac, etc. all had way better solutions to the problem. The most important goal for Windows was to run a multi-user environment on top of a single-user Operating System that would perhaps be best be described as an "embedded OS". It worked at the time, but it wasn't a very effective way to handle things long-term. Plus, GUI designs have never been reevaluated in the face of modern hardware.
Read the article. I haven't covered everything (it's an article, not a book), but you may find that it's actually a good idea. BTW, the follow-up is here [blogspot.com].
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:3, Insightful)
Feel free to travel back in time and suggest they do that. The registry has been around for over a decade. SQLite has not. The registry works (yes, maybe it can get corrupted, but I haven't had that happen in years), and there's other stuff Microsoft can and should focus on besides re-writing the registry.
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:2, Insightful)
M$ has had other good innovations too. Don't just knock something because it's from M$. Knock the Windows Registery because it's outdated, aniquated, and unreliable. :-p
(Mod me down if you have to...)
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, I'm convinced the registry doesn't require a separate implementation from the filesystem.
Designers (including Mozilla's) are entrenched in the idea that lots of tiny files are bad. Traditional filesystems and even api's to some extent aren't optimized for that. But Microsoft was in a different position, because the designers of the registry were in cahoots with the filesystem people (same company). Instead of inventing the registry, they should have optimized NTFS for config info.
Re:That's It?? (Score:1, Insightful)
As a person who has had my Solaris and Linux boxes 0wned, I can quite confidently say no system is free from exploits. Unix has always been a joke from a security standpoint (compared to "real" OSes like MVS, VMS, and MULTICS). The only reason it seems so secure now is that the vast majority of users are now running Windows. That's not to say that Windows is where all of the exploits are, but that's where all of the exploitERs are! I'm sure you could have a perfectly exploit-free time enjoying Windows 3.1 on the Internet. Not because Win3.1 doesn't have any security holes (indeed, it doesn't have any sort of security at all), but simply because nobody is trying to exploit Win3.1.
dom
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:3, Insightful)
A: for each Key you'd have a file, at worst, so 131181 files
B: alot of the keys and values are pretty uselss and totaly OVERKILL i think
C: many and i mean MEANY keys and subkeys are like
D: there is much duplication of keys and values.
So there would nto be 131181 files, no where near
theres alot of stuff in there thats pretty weird to have in there
registry is prone to bloat, at least it used to be and probably still is
some of the stuff in there is more suited to a
it makes mvoeing configs across installs or frmo 1 system to another damned hard.
Now what makes me sure it was the wrong way is linux uses config files, and a linux system with a full package install seems ot have ALOT more software to configure then windows, so how come linux can easily use config files and windows can't? windows can't need that much config data??
config files are alot easier to edit, change and debug then the registry, as you have many MANY tools that can read and manipulate text files. grep, find, whatever.
Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I love the questions they ask. (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, FAT (like most old Unix filesystems) could not have more than 64k files (each taking up at minimum one sector) and directories are not stored in sorted order on disk. This means that putting every key in a different file would start to limit the number of other files you could put on the filesystem and cause config file access to be slow because you would end up with lots of files in large directories.
When the system boots it creates a copy of the systems configuration data (LastKnownGood), which is relatively easy because it involves just copying a segment of a file. If the data were stored in a hundred or more tiny files, making this copy would have a huge performance impact on boot-up.
The Unix answer to this question is to either hard code the information right into the executable (most binary installations must go in specific directories) or write out a file in some proprietary format, and that doesn't solve the problem that the registry was initially designed for -- to manage all of the components of a distributed object system (OLE) where none of the components needs to know where any other component is installed or what it can do.
Quite honestly, I think the registry is a good solution to the problem of where to store lots of configuration data. Unfortunately its growth has not been managed, and is now a mess. Still, doing a search in regedit for some configuration is much easier than trying to grep the filesystem for something.
dom
Re:Operating Systems Aren't Amazing Anymore (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if Google will ever do something that doesn't involve sticking a search engine on top of some existing technology.
The stuff is amazing because it is mind boggling hard, not because it is a gigantic leap. The easy problems in computer science are done. You aren't going to see fantastic leaps like you did when the industry was still in its infancy.
Re:Transcript (Just Intros - Working On The Rest) (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, the material on Channel9 tends to be informative and more than just "advertising" in most cases — the technicians and so forth they interview are enthusiastic but mainly wanting to get across the things they've been working on (as technicians do). I've seen plenty of sites with interviews of *nix professionals and so on, and I wouldn't say they were more or less "advertising", on the whole.
The interviewers on Channel9, however, tend to be massively overenthusiastic to the point of hilarity. Note how he replies to I've been working on where the hardware meets the software with Excellent!. It is irritating, but then that's why I don't watch a lot of video online. :D