Kernel

Arun Kishan digs into the low level details of Windows 8's new application model. How has Process Lifetime Management (PLM) been reimagined in Windows 8? How does app suspension work, exactly, or, what happens when an app is no longer in the foreground and not closed? How much work…

At any given point, Windows is executing a lot of code. Some of this code runs in the background as services. In pre Windows 7 operating systems some services were set to auto run even though the configuration of the system (installed apps, hardware, etc) did not warrant them running. This had a…

From the kernel to the shell, Windows Vista is a very different OS than XPSP2. How so? Here, Charles interviews Architect Narayanan Ganapathy whose team of highly skilled engineers write the Windows IO system, driver frameworks and related technologies. So, what, exactly, is new in Windows…

Windows kernel expert and kernel "professor" David Solomon and Windows Kernel Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich have written another great book covering, in great detail, the internal composition of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. A third author,Alex Ionescu,…

The Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH) is a subsystem of Windows 7 responsible for monitoring application crashes and autonomously applying mitigations to prevent future crashes on a per application basis. For the vast majority of users, FTH will function with no need for intervention or change on their…

The Windows 7 project involved very efficient software engineering planning and execution. It is no surprise that an equivalent level of efficiency exists throughout the OS (efficiency in how the OS deals with faults, threads, memory management, power management, process…

There have been a lot of positive reviews of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS release, code named "Mango." This release is a big one. It contains over 500 new features (and over 1000 new APIs), is full of improvements - from the core OS to the performance of UI…

  The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that…

What happens, exactly, when you turn your computer on? Yeah, you see the black screen and words scroll by, then, finally, the Vista startup sound... But, there's a good deal of code that runs in this preOS environment, much of it composed in languages you've probably never written (like 16-Bit…

Here's the second part of the interview with Neal Christiansen. He talks about the internals of Windows and how File System Filters work.Here's the first part of the interview in case you missed that.