[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 12:46:14 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:

> ... there is a certain technical elegance to the
> WSL1 mechanism.

When Windows NT was first created, it was supposed to support the idea of 
“personalities” to allow different kinds of userland apps to run on top of 
the same core kernel. For example, Win32 was just one kind of 
“personality”, while the POSIX layer was implemented as another kind.

You would think the WSL1 would have been implemented as just another 
“personality”. But no. It appears the whole extensibility of the 
“personality” architecture has kind of bitrotted away in the years since 
the introduction of NT, so WSL1 was implemented in its own unique kind of 
way (don’t ask me how).

And, in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be implementing a well-
documented API, with plenty of example source code to refer to, they still 
couldn’t get WSL1 to work right. So they had to chuck it away and bring in 
a proper Linux kernel instead.