Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs

Posted by SockThief 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by EvanAnderson 1 day ago

> Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for...

A person after my own heart. NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.

Comment by jmmv 1 day ago

I was curious about this a couple of years ago and ended up digging into the history of the NT design, comparing it to contemporary Unix systems, and writing this: https://jmmv.dev/2024/09/windows-nt-vs-unix-design.html . Pretty enlightening exercise.

Comment by mvdwoord 22 hours ago

Great read. It reminded me of a talk I attended in Amsterdam by Mark Russinovich.

Windows and Linux: A Tale of Two Kernels - Tech-Ed 2004

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HdV9QuvgS_w

Comment by trentnelson 12 hours ago

Great article… but no mention of one of NT’s best features: completion ports! It ties together all the best features of the NT kernel and makes writing performant multi-threaded I/O applications (especially socket servers) a delight. The thread pool APIs introduced in Vista (which use completion ports under the hood) were also a sublime addition. https://pyparallel.org was possible to hack into existence over the course of about 3 months thanks to all these powerful primitives.

Comment by bananaflag 17 hours ago

I have heard that the 2nd edition of Inside Windows NT is much more informative than the 1st.

Comment by dontlaugh 44 minutes ago

It’s certainly sad for long it took for IOCP to be copied in the form of io_uring.

Comment by Tuna-Fish 1 day ago

Too bad for all the horrible misfeatures that got designed in and that we still have to live with, like the entire I/O Manager/Object Manager/filters/driver stack mess, with no caching anywhere above the drivers.

Comment by happymellon 18 hours ago

NT was criminally underrated by Microsoft.

Far too many features required 3rd party tooling to access, or were buried within menus of menus. Then were slowly either duplicated or replaced with half baked solutions.

Comment by speed_spread 17 hours ago

Microsoft never built the cheap, CLI-only version of NT that would have given Linux a run for its money. It would have helped preserve some of the hacker mindshare they once had with DOS.

Comment by tavavex 12 hours ago

Doing that would open them to the possibility of a competing stack that could push out the default Windows one, similar to a different Linux distro. Also, they wouldn't be able to be kings of the system and force whatever they want onto you, because you could then switch away to a different NT-based distro. They just wanted the hackers to go away, it's simpler for them.

The closest they ever got to a 'nothing' NT was something like Windows Core or Factory/Validation OS. They still ship with some windowing capabilities, but they could strip them out if they wanted to, because there is a barebones text-only mode in Windows. Of course, all these editions are or were tightly regulated and only issued to big businesses who are supposed to have them, it's nothing that a Linux user would want.

Comment by indrora 8 hours ago

More specifically, it came at a time where they had to be very careful what they did because they had the DOJ peering down their neck.

Windows didn't ship with a competent PDF reader for over a decade and some because of the DOJ: Any attempt by Microsoft to enter a market that already had a competition was seen as anticompetitive.

It's pretty trivial to get ValidationOS running, even down to RL1 where the kernel and NT execution environment are the only things you have: https://youtu.be/Zw5ysOJcY84?t=610

Comment by EvanAnderson 16 hours ago

A fever dream of mine is a "distribution" of NT that ships with the Interix subsystem and boots to text mode (or serial console) by default.

Comment by justincormack 16 hours ago

Windows Nano Server nearly was that although wasnt cheaper.

Comment by roryirvine 16 hours ago

I'm fairly vague about post-1990s Microsoft products, but wasn't Windows 2008 exactly that?

No GUI, with admin through Powershell, remote MMC snap-ins, or the SCUM/SCOM automation stuff. The managed hosting company I worked for around 2010 used it fairly heavily, and it didn't seem much worse to admin than the CFEngine / Puppet type tooling we had for Linux at the time.

Comment by EvanAnderson 16 hours ago

Server Core is sort of that. The GUI is still there. You can run full Win32 GUI programs if you bring over the dependencies. There's less bots there but it's not analogous to a lightweight Linux distro that has no windowing environment.

Comment by stonogo 1 day ago

It sure looks a lot like VMS to me...

Comment by mesrik 22 hours ago

It does, and for reason I'm assuming many already know why. But if you weren't joking and were living under a rock. Look up the guy, Dave Cutler, who were mostly responsible putting together both.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Youtube has many of his interviews. The Computer History Museum (CHM) two part is perhaps most extensive. Links below to these.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss

Comment by hagbard_c 17 hours ago

> NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.

Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS. Since it was designed by the designer of VMS (Dave Cutler) it would be comparable to the fictional ThoRix which would be a new OS designed by Thomson and Ritchie after they did Unix.

Comment by EvanAnderson 15 hours ago

> Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS.

My nitpick with the "reimplementation of VMS" statement would be that it didn't target source portability of VMS applications like Linux (and the GNU C library running on top of it) does with Unix/POSIX applications. I see it as Cutler and his team taking lessons learned from VMS and building something new incorporating those lessons in a different requirements framework.

Comment by 5- 16 hours ago

oh, but a unix successor from bell labs is entirely real, it's called unix (v8+).

more seriously, it's called plan9.

Comment by pjmlp 19 hours ago

Kudos for not being another UNIX clone.

However Windows NT originally was already POSIXy, what it lacked all these years was Microsoft being serious about POSIX subsystem, had that been the case, probably Linux would never taken off among PC, the same experience as OS X would be there in 1993.

Comment by EvanAnderson 15 hours ago

The acquisition of OpenNT / Interix / Services for Unix (SFU) gave MSFT a really solid POSIX compatibility offering but it was too late-- Linux was already ascendant by that time. The no cost nature of Linux, as compared to the per-client client licensing for server versions of NT, can't be understated, though.

Comment by pjmlp 15 hours ago

Indeed, Linux only became interesting to me on 1995's Summer, because getting that Linux Unleashed book with Slackware 2.0 CD was the route to easier homework assignments.

I had no way to do proper POSIX development at home with the Windows NT limitations, and access to the university labs running a mix of DG/UX and Solaris servers was rather limited.

Comment by chasil 18 hours ago

Hard file locking makes Windows Update into agony.

I can see the 70s motivation for it, but it is a terrible burden in modern times.

Hopefully is is not implemented here.

Comment by dvfjsdhgfv 20 hours ago

I was looking for that line:

> The contract is that the syscalls and low-level interfaces match those of NT, but not the daemons or how the kernel itself is structured. This is in contrast to what ReactOS aims to do, which is an exact recreation of Windows.

Comment by phendrenad2 1 day ago

> None of the substantive code was written by AI.

That is impressive

Comment by bmacho 20 hours ago

So.. Why NT? Is it fast? Is it secure? Does it allow modern features? Is it hackable? Or why?

Comment by userbinator 1 day ago

IMHO this is one of the OSes with the weirdest decisions I've seen on here. I do agree with using PE instead of ELF, as the dynamic linking situation of the latter (and Unix-likes in general) is, to put it bluntly, a horrid mess.

The POSIX functions are split over ucrtbase, iphlpapi, and ws2_32, as on Windows, with anything that Windows doesn't implement put in mnposix.

LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

I used AI to help with the mechanical parts of porting

I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries. It doesn't look like AI is replacing software developers, but rather boosting them quite significantly; there seems to be a lot of activity and new projects I've seen recently from many who aren't even using AI themselves, but must be somehow being inspired by others to do more.

Comment by pjmlp 20 hours ago

As historical note, not all UNIXes use ELF, not only that came later in UNIX and related clones evolution, some of them like z/UNIX and Aix have gone for a PE like format, COFF.

So in those platforms you can also enjoy having private symbols by default, delayed loading on first call, and the joy of import files.

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h 1 day ago

> it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries

TBF, the only missing part of this is that Darling isn't developed enough to run many Darwin programs; otherwise you can have that today by installing WINE+DOSBox+Darling on Linux or your pick of *BSD or illumos. (Well, running *BSD programs on other systems is a weak point, but otherwise.)

Comment by maharmstone 1 day ago

>LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

There's nothing in Moxnox ucrtbase that's not also in Windows ucrtbase. open(), read(), and write() are all POSIX functions in ucrtbase.