Comment by al_borland
3 days ago
Is this because, in the WSL example, it’s not Linux that’s the subsystem, but rather a Windows subsystem that enables running Linux. Thus the name, Windows Subsystem for Linux?
3 days ago
Is this because, in the WSL example, it’s not Linux that’s the subsystem, but rather a Windows subsystem that enables running Linux. Thus the name, Windows Subsystem for Linux?
It is because the NT kernel implements multiple personalities, so it could compete in the UNIX market. The component in the kernel that implements a personality is called a subsystem. It used to be a correct technical term, but of course using it to describe a well-integrated VM isn't correct.
> It is because the NT kernel implements multiple personalities, so it could compete in the UNIX market.
That wasn’t the original primary reason for it… Windows NT began life as NT OS/2… at first, an evolved OS/2 API was going to be its primary API… then as Windows 3.x took off and the IBM-Microsoft relationship further soured, the OS/2 API was downgraded to a backward compatibility afterthought, and eventually (in Windows XP) dropped entirely.
And because they weren’t even sure what the primary API was going to be at first… and the whole idea of multiple OS “personalities” was all the rage - IBM’s Mach-based Workplace OS sought to unify AIX and OS/2 (and they even talked about extending that to OS/400), Taligent (IBM-Apple joint venture) had similar objectives - so it is understandable they made this API flexibility a focus of their early plans
And the guy they hired as technical lead in developing NT, Dave Cutler - had come from DEC, which had the very real problem of selling two largely incompatible operating systems (Unix and OpenVMS) - and they also sought to unify them through multiple personalities, as their next generation operating system MICA which would merge Unix and OpenVMS, which Cutler was working on, until DEC management decided to cancel the project, and Cutler went to Microsoft to do the same thing there
> the whole idea of multiple OS “personalities” was all the rage
It IS honestly kind of cool. If Microsoft would invest into their solid OS instead of enshitifying it, they could implement Linux and Darwin on a single system. That would be quite a selling point.
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