It has everything – all the bells and whistles. On top of the inverted pyramid is Windows-proper. Microsoft looked at calls made by the kernel towards higher items on the dependency stack, and re-arranged parts of the kernel to eliminate these calls, and make sure the small kernel could run on its own. He also explained what MinWin is: a stripped down, bare metal NT kernel. In a talk on Channel 9, NT kernel guru Mark Russinovich confirmed what Eric Traut had already said a year ago: MinWin is part of Windows 7. However, it still seems to appeal to a lot of people as if it’s some sort of gift from God. You’d think that the MinWin hype would die down, that it would lose its appeal. In fact, Microsoft promotes driver writers to write user land drivers, to prevent stability issues.
Microsoft showed this agility with Windows Vista, where certain subsystems were moved out of kernel land into user land. It’s componetised, and you can move these components in and out kernel land if you want to, with relatively minimal effort. The NT kernel is what some call a hybrid kernel – it’s not a microkernel, but it is laid out as one. People were all excited about this one, but anyone with a bit of knowledge on various kernels knows that Windows NT is a pretty decent kernel, and it should not have been a major effort for Microsoft to strip Windows NT to its core. According to a presentation by Microsoft’s Eric Traut, it was a stripped down, bare metal version of Windows NT, upon which future versions of Windows would be built. This build, carrying number 6801, didn’t have the latest taskbar revamp – you needed a newer build for that, build 6933, which hasn’t been released to the public. We have news for you on the elusive MinWin kernel, which created a sort of crazy hype a year ago, and Rafael Rivera found a way to enable the new taskbar on the pre-beta build handed out to PDC attendees. Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference might be over, but that doesn’t mean news about Windows 7 suddenly stops coming in.
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