MinWin

MinWin is a term used informally by

In an April 2003 interview coinciding with the release of Windows Server 2003, Rob Short, the vice-president of the Windows Core Technology group, explained that creating a command-line version would involve "looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter. A lot of the tools depend on having the graphical interface."^[1] Windows Server 2003 was seen by reviewers such as Direction On Microsoft's Michael Cherry as having reduced the reliance on graphical tools to configure the operating system,^[2] but the operating system itself still required the full graphical interface to be installed, even on servers where it would never be needed.

After Windows Server 2003's release, Rob Short assembled a team of kernel architects at Microsoft, with the intention of untangling and documenting the dependencies within the core operating system. The kernel development team had realized that they were having difficulty being able to "predict the impact of changes and to make broad, cross-group changes to Windows",^[3] and the new kernel architecture team would aim to improve software engineering practices both within the Windows kernel itself, as well as with the other components of Windows. To do this, every component of the operating system (consisting of about 5,500 distinct files in late 2005,^[3] during the development of Windows Vista) was assigned a "layer number" that represents its dependency position relative to other components, with lower-numbered components being closer to the core of the operating system, and higher numbers representing high-level components. With this information, the core architecture team began to address a range of issues where low-level components were reliant on high-level components, and finding ways to resolve those dependencies. In doing so, a number of new options for creating focused sub-sets of Windows for different purposes became possible.

Larry Osterman, a developer on the Windows Audio team at Microsoft, described the effort in a November 2008 posting to the

The first use of the term "MinWin" by Microsoft was in 2003 during the development of Windows Vista, known at the time by its codename, Longhorn. MinWin was described at the time as consisting of approximately 95% of the total Longhorn code base,^[6] with the additions for each edition of Longhorn layered on top of that. While the name MinWin was never used as part of Windows Vista's marketing efforts or in presentations to developers or IT professionals, some of the kernel architecture team's componentization and refactoring work was shipped with Windows Vista.

Windows Server 2008

One of Microsoft's goals for

In October 2007, Eric Traut, a developer at Microsoft, demonstrated a self-contained MinWin system, made up of about 100 files, on which a basic HTTP server was running.^{[10] [11]} Traut noted that MinWin takes up about 25

Several months after Traut's demonstration, some confusion arose from an interview by Ina Fried of CNET's News.com with Steven Sinofsky, the vice-president of Windows engineering at Microsoft. Sinofsky described the Windows 7 kernel as a further evolution of the Windows Server 2008 kernel, itself an evolution of the Windows Vista kernel.^[13] This was interpreted by web sites such as Slashdot^[14] to mean that Windows 7 would not include MinWin. Mark Russinovich suggested that some of the confusion surrounding MinWin may be related to the imprecise use of the word "kernel";^[15] MinWin is not, in and of itself a kernel, but rather a set of components that includes both the Windows NT Executive and several other components that Russinovich has described as "Cutler's NT".^[16]

Windows Server 2016

In Windows Server 2016, Nano Server is an option without the 32-bit compatibility layer or graphics.

See also

• Architecture of Windows NT
• Windows Vista startup process
• Hybrid kernel

References