Operating System

How has Windows evolved, as a general purpose operating system and at the lowest levels, in Windows 7? Who better to talk to than Technical Fellow and Windows Kernel guru Mark Russinovich? Here, Mark enlightens us on the new kernel constructs in Windows 7 (and, yeah, we do wander up into user…

Chris Stevens is a software developer on the Windows kernel team working on the Windows boot environment. Windows 8 boots faster than any other version of Windows. Why? How? Chris begins with the fundamentals (so, if you don't know anything about the boot process or what actually happens when an OS…

Here, we continue our exploration of the morphology of Windows 7 on Going Deep with windows kernel architect Dave Probert. You may remember him from an early four part episode of Going Deep where he teaches us about general purpose operating system architectures and history: Part 1,…

  Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow working on the Windows Azure team. His focus is on solving hard problems related to the Fabric Controller, which is in some sense the Windows Azure operating system kernel - it provides services and management infrastructure for the applications that…

  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…

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…

Drawbridge is a research prototype of a new form of virtualization for application sandboxing. Drawbridge combines two core technologies: First, a picoprocess, which is a process-based isolation container with a minimal kernel API surface. Second, a library OS, which is a version of Windows…

Charles Torre (interviewer) and Michael Lehman (cameraman) continue the "Going Deep: Windows" series with a discussion with Landy Wang, a developer of the oh so important Windows Memory Manager.Sorry for the low audio volume.EDIT November 2, 2008: There is no streaming video for this…

Typed Assembly Language (TAL) extends traditional untyped assembly languages with typing annotations, memory management primitives, and a sound set of typing rules. These typing rules guarantee the memory safety, control flow safety, and type safety of TAL programs. Moreover, the typing constructs…

Jon Berry, a veteran Windows engineer, digs into the new way Windows 8 manages processes to support the brave new world of Windows running on various CPU architectures including ARM and ATOM, which present an interesting set of technical challenges given the need to aggressively…