OS

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…

Paged and Nonpaged Pool. Mark's posts are stellar. The detail, the clarity, the usefulness. Definitely one of my favorite technical Windows-related blogs. The post I linked to specifically is incredibly interesting given that it details a rare, but very painful problem and in process teaches us…

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, Part 2,…

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…

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 mode,…

Microsoft Research Cambridge turned 10 years old this week. Happy birthday MSRC! I was lucky enough to have been there (in fact I am still there, or is that here, as I type) and conducted several interviews with some of the many unusually intelligent and passionate folks who think about the…

If you write code on Windows or like to know what goes on under the hood in Windows, then you've no doubt heard of Mark Russinovich. He's an OS kernel expert and a co-founder of Winternals; a company that produced must-have operating system and development utilities for Windows (Winternals is now…

Ever wonder how we make Windows skus (not why necessarily, though we do cover that briefly, but how, exactly)? How do OEMs like Dell or HP or Whoever get Windows skus onto the millions of PCs they make? Closer to home, how does Microsoft build Windows skus, anyway? How do we build Windows for 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…