Well you didn’t have to ‘craft’ MS-DOS exe’s to run on NTVDM, nor did you have to ‘craft’ OS/2 executables to run on the OS2SS … It was really always up to MS. They easily could have supported Xenix COFF exe’s if they wanted, or Solaris x86 ELF. At the time I think the fear was that if NT did such a good job of running UNIX based stuff, it’d be just another UNIX, instead of a Windows server based OS.

The western world of business does love it’s SLA’s and support agreements (even if they actually offer zero support…) so this actually a big win for FOSS, and more so a loss for the Linux kernel.

This just shows how flexible NT kernel can really be. God bless Mr. Cutler for it!.

Windows being a better Linux than Linux? Maybe 😉

Except that you don’t need to craft your own special PE COFFs with Subsystem-Posix bit header set on. This will run natively ELFs compiled with your latest GCC/Clang flavor.

Is said technology powering this Linux subsystem can be used later also to bring true Win32 app support to Windows Phone devices with Continuum technology enabled. Good innovation old times are coming again by MS.

Checkmate :-).

This is nothing like coLinux though, that carved out it’s own memory space, this is more like POSIX, and the Internetix subsysems from before.

absolutely. Big business will be all over this as a way to get OS support from MS, and app support as a best effort, instead of both as a best effort.

Kind of? It’s back to the old days with the promise of the microkernel with multiple personalities. Now they are making a “Linux” personality that can run an unmodified Ubuntu(Debian) userland. It’s a good win any way you slice it.