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MS plans a future without the Windows OS, start from scratch

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New OS Microsoft MIDORI
User ID: 478839
8/4/2008 10:58 AM
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MS plans a future without the Windows OS, start from scratch

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Windows Codename Seven to be the last of its kind?

As you may have noticed, Microsoft currently is beginning to bring Windows "Seven" to live, a Windows OS which will essentially be a multitouch enabled Vista.
Windows Seven is considered to be that, what Vista once was intended to be. Expect it within next year, plusminus six months.

But this could very well be the last of it's kind, because Microsoft seems to see no future for Windows any longer.

At the risk of undercutting one of its core product lines, Microsoft is conceptualizing a way to move millions of users away from the existing Windows codebase and onto Midori, a legacy-free operating system that is currently evaluated.

Midori has evolved from a Microsoft research project, codenamed "Singularity", which demonstrated how managed code can be used to build a complete operating system, but Midori is very much more than this open-source project.

Internal Microsoft documents reveal the company’s preference of an Windows replacement strategy which is breaking sharply with its past.

The documents describe the legacy-free objective as being a preemptive strike against non-Microsoft operating systems, enabling the company to compete head-on by enticing customers to replace Windows with Midori instead of a non-Microsoft OS.

Midori is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.

One of Microsoft’s goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a migration path.

Windows & Midori : impossible mixture ?

The Microsoft documents propose three possible ways for Midori and Windows to work together.

The first, and perhaps most complex, has applications that run on both Midori and Windows by following a program model that operates similar to Microsoft Research’s Accelerator project. Applications in the Accelerator model execute some parts of applications under Windows threads while executing others on the GPU via a DirectX device driver. Windows wraps the GPU’s hardware resources into that device driver.

Under this scenario, Windows persists as the predominant Microsoft OS, and the Windows Executive, which manages exceptions, stacks, threads and other core constructs, would be extended to support Midori as a subsystem. But doubts remain about the technical implications of that choice.

Microsoft would, as part of this scheme, create a Windows device driver to execute Midori code under Windows, with dedicated hardware resources and rudimentary OS facilities such as Midori’s scheduler and threading model, which enables concurrency. The low initial investment of this driver-based approach to compatibility has its appeal, but the company believes that running a full-featured operating system as a driver would be unwieldy, given the baggage of integrated debugging, its own IO system and its own user interface. Another drawback, noted O’Brien, is that this really doesn’t fit with the line-in-the-sand mindset toward legacy code that Midori is supposed to represent.

A second approach to Midori would fork the executive responsibilities and require the development of an executive for Midori that is based on and would run in parallel with the Windows Executive. This has the advantage of not having to create the Midori Executive from scratch, but maintains the conundrum of trying to run a legacy-free bubble inside of what remains legacy code.

The Midori documents noted several other disadvantages to that approach, including the challenge of assigning resources to the two operating systems. O’Brien pointed out that such an approach would also require some sort of coordinating super-system, which might have to be written from scratch.

The most radical suggestion involves writing the proposed Midori Executive itself from scratch, which would transform the bubble into a truly legacy-free platform. But again, noted O’Brien, Midori would have to have something along the lines of a hypervisor to allow it to run in harness with Windows, which brings its own complications.

The Midori documents also address device driver compatibility, suggesting that it would be possible to have Windows wrap legacy drivers as services, then use cross-OS communication for device access while keeping a strict separation between those services and Midori’s device drivers.

Furthermore, one of the design goals for Midori is to isolate device drivers from the OS. The company is undecided on at least two driver issues: whether device drivers should be written using managed techniques, and whether to build them with a language that lends itself—at least in part—to static analysis. In both cases, increased reliability is the objective.

In the discussion about drivers or the applications that use them, the Midori documents indicated that some internal controversy remains over the degree to which the company can ignore backward compatibility. They indicated that another of the Midori design principles is that the projected OS should be in no way watered down by a commitment to the Windows legacy.

Midori is being designed as a componentized OS and can run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.

Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.
Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

The fundamentals

Unlike Windows, Microsoft intends for Midori to be componentized from the beginning to achieve performance and security benefits. It will have strong isolation boundaries and enforced contracts between components, to ensure that servicing one component will not cause others to fail, while keeping overhead minimal.

At its lowest level, Midori has two separate kernel layers: a microkernel comprised of unmanaged code that controls hardware and environment abstracts, and higher-level managed kernel services that provide the full set of operating system functionality.

The OS will have a single scheduling framework for all device types, known internally as the Resource Management Infrastructure (RMI). RMI will have provisions for resource accounting, quotas and management; resources including IO bandwidth, memory, power and response time will be monitored.

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.

At the presentation layer, Microsoft is making a clean break from the existing Windows GUI model, where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time, and the associated problems that affect OS stability and make it more difficult to write multithreaded applications.

The Midori documents indicate that the company has not decided what user interface abstractions are appropriate when applications cut across boundaries, or how to combine the best qualities of rich client applications and Web applications.

Links and references :

Wikipedia - MIDORI [link to en.wikipedia.org]

[link to www.engadget.com]

[link to search.yahoo.com]

Anonymous Coward
User ID: 478973
8/4/2008 3:03 PM

Re: MS plans a future without the Windows OS, start from scratch	Quote
Midori means "green" like this dead guy depicted here. [link to bp0.blogger.com] Most likely the interface planned for biometric ID interaction that will start in Japan. Would any of you GLP'ers to take a stab at why Sir Gates named it such as he did? Hint: The face on mars is mirror image of the giant they found underneath the pyramid.

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