Midori Unleashed: The Goods on the Future of Windows
Microsoft has a post-Windows operating system in the works, and it is code-named Midori, sources say. What's in it for developers? |
David Worthington over at SD Times has gained access to the details of an integral post-Windows operating system the software giant has been working on.
The project is so important that Microsoft tapped Eric Rudder, former head of Microsoft's server and tools business and a key member of Chairman Bill Gates' faction of the company, to run it.
Several sources have continued to chip away at the Midori story, piecing together critical portions of the overall Midori strategy, here, but in one fell swoop, Worthington snatched the limelight by landing what we shall call "the goods," an internal document Microsoft has closely guarded.
According to Worthington, "Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process."
Moreover, said Worthington:
"One of Microsoft's goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with and interoperate with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a migration path."
And Midori will focus on concurrency, one of the core issues facing developers today, as multicore processors become more mainstream. "According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources," Worthington wrote in his piece.
While Midori is a nice, crunchy, chewy piece of technology for Microsoft to deliver to the post-Windows world, I am most interested in how it will impact developers. From what Worthington says from his perusal of the Microsoft document, developers have much to be tickled about.
"The Midori programming model will tackle state management, which Microsoft admits in its documentation is a challenge in Windows, by migrating APIs, applications and developers to a constrained model," Worthington wrote.
In addition, "The Midori programming model will be particularly useful for service-oriented architectures, by allowing for the decomposition of applications into services that can be partitioned across tiers," Worthington said.
And Worthington writes that, "In a possible link to Microsoft's Oslo composite application initiative, the [Midori] programming model will have a dependence on metadata, with the aim of allowing the system to more reliably manage applications."
Microsoft has other goodies in store, too. Midori is also critical to Microsoft's cloud computing strategy.
"The Midori documents indicate that the proposed OS would have a non-blocking object-oriented framework API," Worthington wrote. "This would have strong notions of immutability--in the sense of objects that cannot be modified once created--and strive to foster application correctness through deep verifiability by using .NET programming languages."
Worthington says the Microsoft documents indicate that the company is "making a clean break from the existing Windows GUI model" at the presentation layer, "where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time, and the associated problems that affect OS stability and make it more difficult to write multithreaded applications."
That's just a small glimpse into what Microsoft is up to with Midori, which the company characterizes as an incubation project in its research group. Worthington has a whole lot more to say on the topic.
Comments (13)
I am really beginning to wonder about the direction that Ballmer is giving Microsoft. It seems like they are getting so desperate to compete with Google that they are going in who knows how many different directions. It almost seems like a shotgun approach to finding some 'next best thing'. First its Yahoo, then AOL, now a web based OS.
What is next?
Jim
Posted by James Stephenson | July 31, 2008 10:11 AM
It seems like Microsoft may finally be 'getting a clue' that their monolithic approach to operating systems is a 'House of Cards' waiting to collapse. Windows Vista appears to have collapsed under the weight of this monolithic approach.
The efficiency and robustness of the modular design of Linux and BSD apparently is beginning to receive some attention in Redmond.
With quad core processors becoming more mainstream on the desktop, it makes sense to use a modular approach and run legacy programs on a virtual machine on one or two cores using a legacy Windows OS. The new apps could run natively on the new OS on the other cores.
I believe this is Microsoft's best chance to stay a dominant desktop OS in the future.
Posted by PEB | July 31, 2008 11:18 AM
interesting choice of name since midori is already a linux distro and a browser using webkit
Posted by James | July 31, 2008 11:58 AM
I'm waiting for them to make a deal with Apple after Snow Leopard ships and simply license the desktop OS, while providing VM or other technologies underneath to take care of the legacy stuff. They've got some serious catching up to do, and might take "end run" approaches.
Posted by Jeff Kopmanis | July 31, 2008 1:23 PM
Get Real! UNIX and LINUX both have used modular architecture in their operating systems.
Just like Microsoft to re-invent the wheel.
Posted by Gifin | July 31, 2008 2:14 PM
I guess "good enough" wasn't good enough.
Posted by George Phillips | July 31, 2008 2:42 PM
@Jeff Kopmanis -- Even in your wildest imagination, Apple will never get close to dent Microsoft's desktop OS business.
Posted by datechman | July 31, 2008 10:38 PM
It is encouraging that Microsoft might FINALLY be getting away from the monolithic OS. When Vista can barely squeeze onto a DVD yet provides few features not already on XP aside from the fancy "window"-dressing, you have to wonder what is in all that extra space...
*NIX has been using a modular approach since day one - it allows for greater security, more robust/stable systems where apps can't crash each other, and facilitates very small footprints for use in embedded devices.
My next question: when are they going to take the modular approach to Office? I'm sorry but I'd REALLY like a pared down version that only takes up 50 MB on my drive and costs $50 for Excel and Word. There's no reason it needs 1.6 GB and costs $350 bucks when the functionality I use has been there for >10 years.
Posted by Blair Christensen | August 1, 2008 10:22 AM
M$....Jack of All Trades
Master of None(Thanks to Vista)
Posted by Matt | August 1, 2008 1:25 PM
Too little too late. MS stumbled badly with Vista when it had a half decent OS in XP to hold itself up until a good solid modular kernel could be developed. Now it playing catchup in the OS department, chasing Google in the online search niche, and still relying on FUD to make itself look better than the open source community's offerings.
It's only a matter of time, and I think it may be shorter than Microsoft thinks, before hardware vendors begin porting drivers directly to Linux, and applications are written for Linux as well.
I have been using Linux desktop for about a years now, and while there are still a few kinks, nothing as major as those of the Windows world to hinder my daily work.
Posted by Fred Mars | August 2, 2008 12:51 AM
Too little to late linux is already hear and java has been around for more than a decade now, so don't invent the wheel microsoft, your days are coming to an end. and that's good we want more robust os, vista can't compete with linux or what google is planning (gooos).
greedy greedy since Mr. Gates left they are trying to catch up with the customers.
too little to late M.S Your vista is :
1-Stupid os
2-In favor of fendors rather than your customers
3-Mercy killing for microsoft
4-Draws more people to open source
5-plain xp with a tweak in the graphic portion
bye ms
Posted by MOHAMMED YAHYAWI | August 4, 2008 3:20 PM
I am waiting for an operating system to run extremely fast. By programming I can get a database system to run extremely fast in the following way: I do a scan of record location information on the hard drive, build a table of record location information in RAM, do all searching subsequently in RAM, and then only go to the hard drive to the exact spot where a record I need is located. The industry needs this capability built into the operating system. Alternatively, the industry needs to see hard drives which are RAM like in speed. Every PC I have owned has had the ridiculous limitation of performing extensive - and slow - processes on the hard drive, to the detriment of performance.
When this issue is addressed it will be the "next big thing".
Posted by JAJansenJr | August 5, 2008 1:48 AM
t makes sense to use a modular approach and run legacy programs on a virtual machine on one or two cores using a legacy Windows OS. The new apps could run natively on the new OS on the other cores.
Posted by oyun | August 12, 2008 7:03 AM