[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[David Goodwin]

In article <v0fbd5$3g795$1 at dont-email.me>, ldo at nz.invalid says...
> 
> On Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:36:41 +1200, David Goodwin wrote:
> 
> > Why go to all the effort reimplementing the whole
> > Linux syscall interface and keeping it up-to-date when you could just
> > run the Linux kernel in a VM.
> 
> Because that was what the whole ?personality? system was supposed to be 
> for. In practice, it didn?t work.

Calling it a personality system perhaps makes it sound more complex than 
it really is.

The NT kernel speaks its own low-level Native API. The Kernel doesn't 
know or care about Win32 or POSIX or any of that stuff. Thats all the 
responsibility of a collection of subsystems running in usermode.

Its not a microkernel like Minix, but its also not quite a monolithic 
kernel like Linux.

> > Are you trying to argue that moving code out of the kernel into
> > userspace is a bad idea?
> 
> It would have been great if they could have implemented the Linux API that 
> way, wouldn?t it? But they couldn?t do it.

They could and they did. WSLv1 exists and it does work surprisingly 
well. WSLv2 works better though, and it is no doubt far easier to 
maintain.

Still not sure what your'e arguing here though. Are you suggesting 
Windows NT should have used a monolithic kernel for some reason? Or that 
a flexible design was a bad idea because it didn't work out perfectly in 
one scenario over 30 years later?