MS is getting more and more odd.
Several places have covered a new MS project bringing a Linux subsystem to Windows kernel components. From an Ars article:
the company has developed some Windows kernel components (lxcore.sys, lxss.sys, presumably standing for "Linux core" and "Linux subsystem," respectively) that support the major Linux kernel APIs. These components are not GPLed and do not appear to contain Linux code themselves; instead, they implement the Linux kernel API using the native Windows NT API that the Windows kernel provides. Microsoft is calling this the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL).
[...] Our understanding is that these are not recompiled or ported versions of the programs (as are used in tools aiming to provide a Unix-like environment on Windows such as Cygwin) but instead unmodified programs. Microsoft is describing this in terms of providing a Linux-like command-line environment at the moment, but from what we can gather, there's little fundamental restriction to this, potentially opening the door to running a wide range of Linux programs natively on Windows.
Also of note in the Ars article:
Microsoft [says] that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will include the ability to run the popular bash shell from Unix, along with the rest of a typical Unix command-line environment.
Other sources: Zdnet, winbeta.org, AnandTech, The Register.
Related Stories
Today at the Microsoft BUILD Conference [keynote video], Kevin Gallow, VP of Windows Developer Platform, announced that the Bash shell is coming to Windows in the form of an Ubuntu image running natively on Windows. This summer, an update will be available to Windows 10 that will allow you to run user mode Linux shells and command line tools, unchanged. According to Scott Hanselman, once you have the update, you can download Ubuntu on Windows from Canonical from the Windows store which will install a real Linux binary. Dustin Kirkland, part of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team, explains this magic in more detail here.
From the last link:
"Hum, well it's like cygwin perhaps?" Nope! Cygwin includes open source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows. Here, we're talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF binaries running directly in Windows.
Editor's note: This story is very much related to this one, but that one doesn't mention the actual Ubuntu-Microsoft cooperation, or Ubuntu's involvement at all. Also, this isn't an April Fools joke, despite me thinking it was one originally.
Here is a really nice blog post from one of the developers of The Linux Subsystem for Windows or Ubuntu on Windows. This blog is by one of the developers, and does a good job of explaining what it will look like as well as presents motivation (although we have no way of knowing MS's true motivation).
Is everything working exactly as expected? No, not quite. Not yet, at least. The vast majority of the LTP passes and works well. But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty's an[d] the vt100. My beloved byobu, screen, and tmux don't quite work yet, but they're getting close!
And while the current image is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, we're expecting to see Ubuntu 16.04 LTS replacing Ubuntu 14.04 in the Windows Store very, very soon.
Finally, I imagine some of you -- long time Windows and Ubuntu users alike -- are still wondering, perhaps, "Why?!?" Having dedicated most of the past two decades of my career to free and open source software, this is an almost surreal endorsement by Microsoft on the importance of open source to developers. Indeed, what a fantastic opportunity to bridge the world of free and open source technology directly into any Windows 10 desktop on the planet. And what a wonderful vector into learning and using more Ubuntu and Linux in public clouds like Azure. From Microsoft's perspective, a variety of surveys and user studies have pointed to bash and Linux tools -- very specifically, Ubuntu -- be available in Windows, and without resource-heavy full virtualization.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Thursday March 31 2016, @06:13AM
Artist's rendering: https://i.imgsafe.org/d9ae25c.png [imgsafe.org]
WIP: http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/avp/images/f/f1/Clones-3-6.jpg [nocookie.net]
Also, I'm happy to report there's now one less indirection layer for http://linux.die.net/man/6/bsod [die.net] .
compiling...
(Score: 1) by Eristone on Friday April 01 2016, @12:26AM
NSFW tag would be nice on the WIP link.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday April 02 2016, @02:43AM
It's enough I have to placate the wills of my own employer, now am I to humor the likes of yours?
Bah...
compiling...
(Score: 1) by Eristone on Monday April 04 2016, @10:01PM
Adding a 4 character warning for those of us who might not have as liberal an employer as yours is an imposition? I could see the complaint here if I had asked you to not post the link, period, but it isn't like people around here are fans of posting the goatse.cx link... and logged in people are generally a tad more trustworthy for link following purposes, so a heads up is kind of useful - not all of us read from our (insert potentially insulting $LOCATION here, including but not limited to "Dorm Room", "Parent's Basement" and "Family Living Room")
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @06:16AM
i love microsoft now
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @06:20AM
http://9gag.com/gag/apvDoPp/microsoft-cancer-is-now-open-source [9gag.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @06:50AM
Why would anyone want to develop a kernel, when crowdsourcing to naive volunteers is cheaper and easier?
Witness the success of Apple. Apple doesn't make a kernel anymore. Apple ripped off CMU and UCB.
Witness the success of Google. Google doesn't make a kernel either. Google just ripped off Linux.
Expect Microsoft to dump the NT kernel in favor of an open source kernel with a compatibility layer on top.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:07AM
FYI it's not a rip off if you follow the terms of the license. However bad you feel about whoever is using the software is irrelevant as long as they abide by the license.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday March 31 2016, @02:21PM
Witness the success of Apple. Apple doesn't make a kernel anymore. Apple ripped off CMU and UCB.
Huh? Apple has a team working full-time on XNU (their kernel). It contains a fair bit of FreeBSD code, (and some CMU Mach code, though a lot of that has been rewritten, including the entire VM subsystem) and code flows in both directions. For example, Apple paid for the FreeBSD mandatory access control framework, which they use in their sandboxing framework.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 31 2016, @06:51AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:05AM
Watch our ass closely. Microsoft does have one thing they have shown themselves to do on many occasions....
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday March 31 2016, @12:09PM
I think they'll have trouble with that last one, especially given their security record. This is lipstick on a pig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday March 31 2016, @04:40PM
This is a very real concern.
The "embrace, extend, extinguish" doesn't properly capture HOW Microsoft has tried this in the past.
First you embrace Linux. Or Ubuntu.
Then you extend it. That is, you add such deliciously addictive features that the great hoardes of sub-par developers simply cannot resist those extended features.
Then, after tons of third party software really only works with Microsoft's extensions, the competition gets extinguished due to lack of developers for their platform.
This is exactly what Microsoft was trying to do to Java when Sun sued it and won over a billion dollars. Extend core parts of Java so that developers on Windows would not realize that some of the delicious api features they were using were not really part of the standard Java platform. But had been added by Microsoft, but deceptively added to the main java namespace to fool everyone.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Saturday April 02 2016, @05:12PM
Well, for starters, I completely agree with what you are saying. But my mind went elsewhere while reading it.
I remember when you could run something like gnome without having to replace all the plumbing to control system services, network daemons, system logging, etc. It was a different world.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 04 2016, @04:53PM
That is why the system plumbing gets changed. To prevent GUI users from being able to work with it.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @03:41PM
I sure this will convince everyone to dump 7 for 10.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:03AM
C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:39AM
dev\windows\system32\drivers\etc\null
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:08AM
Does that mean that soon we'll be able to fix the completely broken[1] start menu on Windows 10 by installing a different window manager / desktop manager?
[1] I still haven't managed to add a folder or even a shortcut to the start menu, without which it's completely useless. I can get rid of the tiles just fine, but without shortcuts to the software I have installed, the start menu is useless, and Windows 10 is still "Windows Tablet Edition".
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday March 31 2016, @04:54PM
To make matters worse, you can't remove start menu programs trivially from the all programs list. Some of the MS anointed ones (hope you like those store and xbox entries) don't appear removable at all.
Literally the last thing preventing my full switch is The Secret World. It appears to just not take with Wine at all. I'm really hoping that when Funcom converts it over to the Unreal engine later this year, it'll be easier to run in Wine. Or better still, a native linux or even OSX version.
MS is dead. This and the Ubuntu article confirm it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:12AM
... the Cygwin folks have been doing this sort of thing for a long time. But if you really want something Unix-like and want decent corporate support for it, get a Mac and you can do what I'm doing right now, running Ubuntu Linux on a 2013 iMac. I use MacOS X on the old one now, mostly to play movies these days since VLC has some rather unpleasant bugs in playing my ripped DVDs.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @01:31PM
What do you run Ubuntu out of on the Mac?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 31 2016, @02:16PM
But if you really want something Unix-like and want decent corporate support for it, get a Mac and you can do what I'm doing right now, running Ubuntu Linux on a 2013 iMac.
Wait a second...you're paving over OS X with Ubuntu?
But Macs and PCs both run on x86 now...
so the only reason you'd want Apple hardware is if it's more quality for the buck...
...but this sounds like you're talking about a company machine. In which case, why do *you* care how much it costs?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday March 31 2016, @05:29PM
Once you've owned a Mac you never want to use anything else, even if you're going to "pave" over Mac OS X. To be completely accurate, I haven't paved it over, it's dual-booted. Have you USED Mac OS X lately? The last spiffy and speedy version was 10.6 "Snow Leopard", with the first 64-bit kernel. All subsequent versions are not very responsive. 10.11 "El Capitan" is a dog on my old iMac and it shouldn't be. But even on the new iMac with twice the number of cores, each one running twice as fast, it's still pretty slow. Linux, by comparison, rocks.
However, to be fair, Ubuntu support for the latest iMac is spotty. Sound doesn't work without running a Python script I got generated and that script has to be run at login, not at boot up, and it has to be run as root so doing Unix magic to change the EUID at runtime has to be done. And the window manager is relatively slow; I can actually detect the action of windows being painted and repainted. Blame X Windows for that. Wayland should fix that problem eventually. Also, sometimes I can't wake it up from a suspend so I don't put it to sleep anymore. But on the whole Ubuntu is preferable for most of what I do: writing, programming, and surfing.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:29PM
OS X is the only one of the Big Three I have absolutely no experience with.
I'm on Linux Mint XFCE these days. Looks like they're gearing up to finally retarget to the next LTS Ubuntu upstream this May/June so reconfiguration is in my future :) As long as I can actually figure out how to do it, I enjoy some amount of tinkering with settings.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:21PM
lol yeah no. I was forced to use a Mac at work once for a week when my Linux machine went down, hated every minute of it mostly because of OS X. The monitor was nice but nothing to write home about. This was a desktop, by the way.
Hardware is hardware -- nothing special about Macs except the hardware has a higher profit margin.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday April 01 2016, @12:00AM
Generally that is the case but I've noticed that all the Macs I've owned over the years have a better fit and finish, and just seem to work more smoothly than PCs. They are also better looking.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2016, @10:52AM
Wait, the Cygwin foks have been modifying the Windows kernel to support Linux APIs? You sure about that?
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:54AM
Just check if these hosts [pastebin.com] are accessible and then refuse the machine? ;-)
Now we just have to wait until some nefarious extra system call shows up as a patch request for Linus.
Any good ideas on how to make Microsoft suffer? :p
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:31AM
I see a great future for software extremists that intentionally cripple compatability.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @07:07PM
I already do this for my software and websites.
I'm prepared to fight the "embracement" by M$.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @01:22PM
Make it run systemd.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:29AM
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they develop subsystems to their kernel, then you win."
Or, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, . . . well, you cant' get fooled again!" Worst President Ever of the United States of America, Grover Cleveland.
(Score: 4, Touché) by snufu on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:30AM
Finally! The best of both worl...waitwut?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:36AM
They plan to have Ubuntu [zdnet.com] working on Windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:38AM
Oops, mod redundant please as that's in the summary.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:49AM
the best of both worlds, systemd with telemetry
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:26AM
Stop. Giving. Them. Ideas.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:44AM
I've seen it described elsewhere as bash for Windoze.
(There's already a FOSS project by that description.)
So, once they have their command interpreter out of the usual multi-year vaporware phase and debugged to the usual MICROS~1 standard, you -may- be able to run some CONSOLE apps. [google.com]
Those are typically pretty DOS-like.
...with the occasional exception. [netsurf-browser.org]
...and all of this assumes that CMD.EXE understands what you're trying to tell it to do.
I won't be holding my breath.
More openwashing from M$--trying desperately to ride someone else's coattails.
...and when they try to get GUI apps going?
Heh. No rush to get your popcorn.
I figure that will be 2019 at the earliest.
.
At another site, somebody was trying to be funny and mentioned the security and stability of Windoze combined with the elegance of Linux apps.
.
...and what's with "Main Page:" in the title of this story on the front page of the site?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @08:59AM
I see that on the main page, too. It also says there are zero comments in this thread. The site has been funky.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @09:16AM
Somebody broke the site and forgot to clean it up all the way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @09:45AM
> I've seen it described elsewhere as bash for Windoze.
In the summary it's described as "the popular bash shell from Unix, along with the rest of a typical Unix command-line environment" i.e. GNU bash.
What they're doing, as I understand the reports, is providing a layer of compatibility with the Linux ABI, i.e. the Linux kernel syscalls, so unmodified binaries compiled for Linux can be run. They're not reinventing bash.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:48AM
So wine in reverse, i.e. W(h)ineR?
(Score: 2) by ragequit on Thursday March 31 2016, @02:57PM
So is this "Windows Services for UNIX "?
--ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX [wikipedia.org]
--ref: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463212.aspx [microsoft.com]
or is it GNUWin32?
--ref: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ticho on Thursday March 31 2016, @09:08AM
Finally, I will be able to run my favourite Windows apps using Wine on Windows. The dream will come true.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:51AM
Well, technically, you'll be using Wine for Linux on Windows. Wine on Windows doesn't work at all the last time I checked.
It would be hilarious if this subsystem actually works that well and it delivers additional Windows game compatibility. Even more hilarious if Microsoft were to bundle Wine... onto Windows.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday March 31 2016, @12:03PM
Well, technically, you'll be using Wine for Linux on Windows.
That was the point of my (perhaps badly phrased) joke.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this roundabout way would become the only good way to run legacy Windows apps on future Windows versions. :)
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday March 31 2016, @12:12PM
My joke subsystem failed to initialize.
"Dupe" of this article runs in 40 minutes, so collect your thoughts.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @09:18AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKgPY1adc0A [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:33AM
I'm still digesting this news, but it looks like we won. Out of all the competing ways of developing software (JCL and COBOL, bloated IDEs, etc) the UNIX command-line approach has emerged as almost 100% victorious, conquering the Mac, Windows, and Linux. Embedded systems like the Pi use Linux. Android and iOS are based on UNIX variations. We tried just about everything, and command-line UNIX has emerged as the winning philosophy of software tool construction. Small, ad-hoc utilities glued together by command lines and scripting languages. Lots of small pieces to allow innovation to occur organically. The days of the monolithic environment dictated to you by a corporation are over.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Touché) by takyon on Thursday March 31 2016, @11:47AM
In other words:
Embrace.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2016, @12:04PM
Microsoft 💔 Linux
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday March 31 2016, @03:44PM
I think capitulate is the right word. MS has stubbornly clung to its non-UNIX way of software development for a long, long time. While the rest of the world bypassed it and moved on. I think they're finally simply admitting that they lost, in a way that lets them save face. We'll have VB6 forever, of course, but the days of Visual Studio dictating how people develop software seem to be ending.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday April 02 2016, @02:11AM
Won the battle, sure.
Microsoft wanted to put its hands on linux since the doublespeak declaration "GPL is cancer".
But it could not use it because it worked too well, and the software+hardware establishment knows that there is little money to be done on systems that work well.
Then, in less than one year, linux systems mostly adopt systemd as default and, voila', MS adopts linux.
I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday March 31 2016, @04:30PM
(ducks, hides under desk)
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.