The Sad History of the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem
August 24, 2010 59 Comments
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also wanted to include compatibility to run Windows 3.x applications and to meet 1980s era DoD Orange Book and FIPS specifications to sell to the defense market. As a result, Windows NT was developed as a multiuser platform with sophisticated discretionary access controls capabilities and it was implemented as a hybrid microkernel 3 userland environments:
- Windows (Win32)
- OS/2
- POSIX
Microsoft had a falling out with IBM over Win32 and the NT project split from OS/2. The team focus shifted to Win32 so much that the Client-Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS) that hosts the Win32 API became mandatory and OS/2 and POSIX subsystems were never really completed but they were shipped with the first five versions of Windows NT through Windows 2000. The OS/2 subsystem could only run OS/2 1.0 command-line programs and had no presentation manager support. The POSIX subsystem supported POSIX.1 spec but provided no shells or UNIX-like environment of any kind. With the success of Win32 in the form of Windows 95, the development of the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems ceased. They were entirely dead and gone from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Meanwhile, around 1996, Softway Systems developed a UNIX-to-Windows NT porting system called OpenNT. OpenNT was built on the NT POSIX subsystem but fleshed it out into a usable UNIX environment. This was at a time when UNIX systems where hugely expensive. Softway used OpenNT to re-target a number of UNIX applications for US Federal agencies onto Windows NT. In 1998, OpenNT was re-named Interix. Softway Systems also eventually built a full replacement for the NT POSIX subsystem in order to implement system calls that the Microsoft POSIX subsystem didn’t support and to develop a richer libc, single-rooted view of the file system and a functional gcc.
Microsoft acquired Softway and the Interix platform in 1999. Initially Interix 2.2 was made available as a fairly expensive paid add-on to Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000. Later it was incorporated as a component of Services for UNIX 3.0 and 3.5 (SFU) and SFU was made free-of-charge. When Interix became free, Microsoft removed the X11 server component that was previously bundled with Interix because in the wake of U.S. vs Microsoft, they did not want to defend law suits from the entrenched and expensive PC X Server industry but the X11 client libraries remained.
SFU/Interix 3.0 was released in early 2002 followed up with SFU 3.5 less than two years later and cool stuff got implemented like fast pthreads, fork(), setuid, ptys, deaemons with RC scripts including inetd and sendmail among other things. InteropSystems ported OpenSSH and developed a high-performance port of Apache using pthreads and other proof-of-concept ports like GTK and GIMP among many other things. Hotmail even ran on Interix. And enterprising people did cool things like a Linux ELF binary loader on top of Interix.
I got into this stuff and built and donated ports to the SFU/SUA community, including cadaver, ClamAV, GnuMP, libtool, NcFTP, neon, rxvt and gnu whois. My company sponsored the port of OpenSSH to Interix 6.0 for Vista SUA (because it broke backwards compatibility with Interix 3.5 binaries). We ran Interix on all of our workstations and servers. We used it for management, remote access and to interop with clients who used Solaris, Linux and OS X on various projects.
Slowly Going Off the Rails
With Windows Server 2003 R2 (and only R2), Interix became a core operating system component, rebranded as “Subsystem for UNIX Applications” (SUA). Around this time, the core development team was reformed in India rather than Redmond and some of the key Softway developers moved on to other projects like Monad (PowerShell) or left Microsoft. Interix for Windows Server 2003 R2 (aka Interix 5.2) was broken. It shipped with corrupt libraries and a number of new but flawed APIs and broke some previously stable APIs like select(). Also, related to the inclusion of Interix as an OS component, SP2 for Windows Server 2003 clobbers Interix 3.5 installations.
Things have been downhill from there. It’s not just that obvious things didn’t get implemented like a fully-functional poll() or updating binutils and gcc to something reasonably modern. The software suffered from severe bitrot.
One of the consequences of including SUA as an OS component has been that a bifurcation of the “subsystem” from the “tools”. The subsystem consists of just a few files: psxss.exe, psxss.dll, posix.exe and psxrun.exe. This implements the runtime and a terminal environment but nothing else, not even libc. In order to get shells, PTYs and usable programs, you have to install the “Utilities and SDK for UNIX-based Applications” (aka tools) which is sizable download. Apparently Microsoft has concern about bundling GPL code onto the actual Windows media.
OK. This is a little weird but not a big deal except that the development timeline of the tools is now completely out of whack with Windows releases. The tools for Vista were only available in beta when Vista went gold and the version for Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 was not available until about a month after Vista SP1/Win2k8 was released. When Windows 7 was released no tools were available at all in July 2009 when Windows 7 was released. They didn’t become available until 8 months later in March 2010 and contain no new features.
To top things off, while SFU 3.5 ran on all versions of NT 5.x, SUA only runs on Windows Server and the Enterpise and Ultimate client editions. SUA is not available on Vista Business or Home and Windows 7 Professional and Home editions.
Is Interix Dead?
For some reason Microsoft seems to be ambivalent about this technology. On the one hand they bring it into the core of the OS and make it a “premium” feature that only Enterprise and Ultimate customers get to use and on the other they pare back development to almost nothing.
Interix has been supported with support forms and a ports tree maintained by InteropSystems collectively known as SUA Community which operates with supplemental funding from Microsoft. The /Tools ports tree is the source for key packages not provided by Microsoft such as Bash, OpenSSH, BIND, cpio and a ton of libraries that Microsoft does not bundle. Microsoft has been increasingly reluctant to fund the SUA Community and has survey users on a number of occasions. The latest survey was very pointed and culminated with Microsoft cutting off funding and shuttering the SUA Community site on July 6th, 2010 but a few days later it was back online. I’m not sure how or why.
I have no inside knowledge but my gut says that Interix has lost internal support at Microsoft. It is being kept on life support because of loud complaints from important customers but it is going nowhere. I will be surprised if there is a Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications in Windows 8. I think the ambivalence is ultimately about an API war. At some level, the strategerizers have decided it is better to not dignify UNIX API with support. I think the calculus is that people will still use Windows but it chokes off oxygen for UNIX-like systems if it takes a lot of extra work to write cross-platform code for Windows and UNIX—the premise being that you write for Windows first because that’s where the market is. Furthermore, in a lot of business cases what is needed is Linux support or Red Hat Linux version X support in order to run something. I think Microsoft realizes that it is hard for Interix to beat Linux which is why SUSE and Red Hat Linux can be virtualized under Hyper-V.
I also believe that Microsoft sees C/C++ APIs as “legacy”. I think they want to build an OS that is verifiably secure and more reliable by being based on fully managed code. The enormous library of software built for the Windows API is a huge legacy problem to manage in migrating to such a system. Layering POSIX/UNIX on top of that makes it worse.
Whatever the reason, it seems pretty clear that Interix is dying.
Brian Reiter's Thoughtful Code 
Pingback: » The Sad History of the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem « Thoughtful Code RWPS
Thanks for the historical inside… I tried to use this stuff about 1 year ago, after trying powershell (which is definitively NOT a unix shell and does not target interoperability => useless), without success for both.
I now understand why: Development in India does not cost a lot… but you usually have, more than with other countries, what you pay for! If Microsoft is reluctant to pay/support… the issue will be a very quick dead.
So I moved to Cygwin, largely sponsored by Red-Hat… and I found their 1.7 branch very nice: So Microsoft probably want to shutdown unix stuff inside windows, but Red-Hat understood the problem and it’s business implications, filling the gap!
The result for Microsoft will be another piece of customer needed feature going out of their control… on their OS! So stupid, isn’t it?!
According to debian/interix bug database select(0,..) was a) already broken in 3.5 b) this bug is (as you may check, that’s easy) not that critical, actually there is no sane reason to use select instead of sleep() (and it does not appear if there are real fd’s in any set)
and aparently you hit the nail in the head with this article since win 8 don’t have a posix subsystem anymore. I’m a linux user and linux/windows programmer for 10 years and I didn’t know such thing even existed, I found your article because someone mentioned SUA on a forum when listing the changes for win8 then I went “whaaa? there is posix stuff inside windows?”.
There is a “Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications [Deprecated]” in Windows Server 2012. I admit that I haven’t bothered to install it and try to get the Tools and SDK working on top. I think it is abandonware at this point.
that’s something one need a really good reason to mess with, seems like it’s not fun at all. I’m pretty satisfied using the mingw32 shell that comes along with git on windows plus console2 for tabs and vim. It’s a hundred times better than using that horrible horrible visual studio and that’s all I need to program at work.
I don’t really know what I’m talking about but it seems that it’s one of those things that have very little use anyway. Isn’t it better to just use Cygwin or something for most uses you would have of a posix kernel?
There was a lot of really cool stuff in there. It provided a cc script to drive cl.exe with posix semantics. The behavior of pretty much everything was posixally correct. They had fast pthreads and fork() built on top of the kernel APIs. Generally speaking Interix binaries were dramatically faster that Cygwin. It rides on top of the kernel as a parallel subsystem to csrss (win32). It was cool. At one point, it ran Hotmail and Ballmer claimed NT would soon be a better Unix than Linux.
Yeah it sounds way better than working with .NET.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35512
Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications includes base utilities, software development kits (SDKs), and shells for use with Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications, a feature that is available for installation on Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows Server 2012.
Go ahead and use it if you want, but it will be a frustrating experience. The APIs and utilities are very old.
From the Download page you linked:
“Note that Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications has been deprecated, and will not be available in future releases of Windows or Windows Server.”
The link there references the following:
“The Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is deprecated. If you use the SUA POSIX subsystem with this release, use Hyper-V to virtualize the server. If you use the tools provided by SUA, switch to Cygwin’s POSIX emulation, or use either mingw-w64 (available from Sourceforge.net) or MinGW (available from MinGW.org) for doing a native port.”
I was stunned to see Microsoft is actively, officially advocating Cygwin and MinGW. I don’t expect SUA to still be there in “Blue” because it is a new kernel revision to NT 6.3.
Thanks for this. Mingw is broken so I was considering installing cygwin for a nice posix development environment when I realized that my copy of Vista came with SUA. And now, several hours later, I realize why nothing is working properly. Pity. Cygwin it is, then.
I did some stuff with Interix a while back (I did a Linux binary loader for it, which would run unmodified Linux binaries on top of Interix… it was a scary, fragile pile of hacks, but to my surprise and horror, it worked well enough to run big chunks of Debian and apt). Unix-wise it was pretty old-school, and it didn’t have a lot of the newer Posix APIs, but it actually worked really well.
It was pretty obvious it was being killed by creative neglect, though — having to manually install multiple hotfixes in order to make it work well was a sure sign. Which is rather sad, as it was a really nice piece of work and very comfortable to use. Much more so than Cygwin.
That is extremely cool.
Sigh.
Anyone know what happened to the interix sua community website?
Microsoft stopped funding it.
Pingback: The Activity Designer
Full disclosure, I think Windows objectively has pretty awesome kernel and development tools available, and the drivers/hardware capabilities are abundant for every pocket.
As a software engineer however I have to admit that if anything moved my workflow away from Windows it was the UNIX/GNU toolsets available on OSX and Linux. I tried using Cygwin as much as humanly possible but it was just too flakey and broken.
MS should reconsider. After all, Apple did.
The only reason I bought the Ultimate version of Vista was for SFU/SUA support. At the time, there were promises that Microsoft would continue to support the technology. I am sorry I bought the Ultimate version just for that and would not do so again should a similar choice arise in the future. I do a lot of cross-platform programming and SFU/SUA sounded like a great solution. When it became freely available, I attempted to download it for my XP system. It refused to install. I should have known at that point there would be issues using it. I’ve tried Cygwin and it works much better than SFU/SUA as far as supporting any recent version of Windows and it’s also helpful for porting POSIX compliant programs and libraries. However, there are still several porting issues. There are also license issues if you want to develop programs that are not Open Source. I typically find it’s easier to port applications using MinGW than Cygwin. I have X Windows libraries and server built and working natively with MinGW instead of via Cygwin and its POSIX layer. With the fork of MinGW (now there’s MinGW and a separate MinGW64 project), many Open Source programs work on one or the other version, but not necessarily both. That places further burdens on cross-platform development and porting. Also, the runtime licenses have changed for both versions of MinGW, making it not as suitable for commercial development anymore. llvm is an interesting option, but, for now, it can’t create an executable on Windows without using gcc. I can see why so many developers I come across have switched to Apple, especially when it comes to cross-platform or web development. As a long time Windows user, I’m very discouraged by the current situation. We’ve gone from a number of free C/C++ compilers that were competing to implement the latest standards and technologies to a few free compilers with licenses that may not be that friendly for commercial development and in many cases, little or no interest in Posix compatibility. I’m still looking for solutions. I can no longer continue to use an older version of MinGW with the older, more liberal runtime license. Too many Open Source applications are requiring support for more recent C/C++ standards. There have been various projects over the years that use gcc with more POSIX compatible runtime libraries (including Cygwin). I’m seriously considering continuing to work with gcc, but with different runtime libraries that have more lenient licensing and better POSIX support. It would be nice to find another project or other developers with similar goals. However, even if I have to start with a recent version of gcc, the last public domain version of the MinGW runtime and then start adding in better POSIX support, it’s a better alternative than what I have now. I already have a library of functions that emulate some POSIX capabilities.
Would be very interested to hear what solutions other developers decide to use for cross-platform support in place of SFU/SUA. I think it’s a great shame these technologies never got the support they needed to succeed. It really was a good concept and I would have been thrilled to place my porting efforts behind it, if it was useable on all the latest versions of Windows and not just certain systems.
The only thing besides Cygwin and MinGW I can think of is MKS. I haven’t tried that.
It’s just much easier to use OS X as a host. Windows in a VM for Windows things. Linux and BSD VMs, too. VMs are cheap to run now.
The download of the sua for Windows 7 cannot be found. Links have become dead.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=2391
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=139521.
Earlier and later versions are readily available.
I wish to get this. I bought Windows 7 Ultimate to try it.
Even 6 years ago when Windows 7 was new the UNIX tools bundled with SUA were really old. You needed the SUA Community Warehouse pkg_add or pkgsrc to get reasonably modern tools and libraries. Microsoft pulled the plug on the SUA Community sponsorship some time ago and it isn’t there anymore.
Today your best options for running UNIX tools on Windows are Cygwin and MSys or a virtual machine running real Linux or BSD. Git for Windows actually bundles a minimal suite of MSys-based UNIX tools which is what I use but I have turned the whole situation on its head and run Windows Server in VM with Visual Studio and Git for development purposes. At this point you should really be using PowerShell for Windows administration.
I’m not looking for a Unix/Linux solution. I just wanted to use this particular Microsoft program. I don’t understand why it has become unavailable while earlier versions are still available. I’m pretty sure I found the working link just a few weeks ago, but wasn’t ready for the large download. Cygwin seems useful but as I understand it, it isn’t a real Linux, just pretending to be so in Windows. I’m not trying to solve cross platform issues entirely, but curious what this program does.
Apologies for the dual post, but I can’t see how to delete it.
On Windows 7 SUA came in 2 parts. There is a Windows Component in Add/Remove Programs called Subsystem for UNIX applications that you enable. This essentially adds the POSIX.1 system call personality layer to the NT kernel but doesn’t do anything else. You can’t access that directly without code compiled for it which is in the 2nd part. The 2nd part is a large download that contains POSIX.2 shells and utilities. You get old versions of csh and ksh as well as an old version of perl5 and a pile of standard UNIX command-line utilities, really old X11 libraries and standard clients (but no X server), headers, and a really old version of gcc. The Tools Warehouse run by former Softway developers (which is gone now) was the way you used to modernize the system. You might be still be able to update the ancient base with pkgsrc from the NetBSD project but you are basically signing up for a science project which is cool if that’s what you want to do.
The X server used to exist but Microsoft removed it somewhere along the way over anti-trust concerns. You can use Xming as a workable X server. There is no sound API interface though. You can cobble something together with esound built with cygwin1.dll.
Good luck!
Yes, the 2nd part is what I am trying to obtain. All links to it are dead. That is what I have been posting about.
You’re right. Even the internal links from download.microsoft.com and msdn.microsoft.com come up with a 404 page for the Windows 7 version. If I recall correctly, I think that Windows would prompt you with the download link after you install the Subsystem for UNIX Applications. The reason that it is a separate download are (a) Microsoft was (is?) allergic to distributing anything GPL on the same media with Windows and (b) it is so enormous it bloats the ISO. I checked my MSDN subscriber downloads and it is also not there. I’ve checked on my local archives and I don’t have a copy anymore, either. You’re only option at this point is to open up a support ticked with Microsoft and complain.
FWIW, this stuff is completely gone as of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. I have a strong suspicion that that they removed the download when Windows 7 went off of “mainstream support” and onto “extended support” in January 2015. To me, the odd thing is that the Vista/Windows Server 2008 version is still available. I would not be surprised if that is an oversight. I expect the Windows Server 2012 “deprecated” version will go away in January 2018 when Windows Server 2008 goes off of “mainstream support”. Obviously it is already unsupported on Windows 8 because support ended on January 12, 2016, with a forced upgrade to Windows 8.1 which does not include the Subsystem for UNIX Applications at all anymore.
The thing is that all of the original guys either never came over to Microsoft, work on PowerShell and Windows Automation with Jeffry Snover now, or left Microsoft. During the Steven Sinofsky period, Microsoft off-shored the product to a group in India and put it on minimal life support which is why there were never any new features. They basically just kept the old thing from Windows Server 2008 working. I was connected to some of those developers in India and the ones that I knew don’t seem to be working at Microsoft anymore, either.
I’m sorry if you bought Windows 7 Ultimate only for this feature.
Hi Brian,
Any chance you have a backup/copy of the SUA Community stuff?
I’ve been looking for it for a long while with no luck.
Thanks.
No. The SUA Community had a package system similar to BSD pkg which was a ton of .tgz files in a structured directory system on an ftp server. I have about a dozen packages that I was maintaining up to the point where I stopped, but they have dependencies on other packages that you can’t get and they are about 10 years old. I think your best bet at getting and managing new packages for Interix is to use pkgsrc from the NetBSD project. The major impediments are that you have gcc 3.3 which is super-old. I know there was a problem getting the gcc project to accept patches that Microsoft commissioned to make gcc 4.x work properly on Interix. I don’t know if gcc4 can be built from the official gnu.org source and work. Another issue is that some of the APIs are weird or incomplete which can confuse configure scripts. A bunch of stuff you will need to build other things is missing from the SUA Tools and Utilities including bash, libtool, gmp, openssl, openssh, zlib, and bind9. If I recall one API example is that autoconf detects poll.h but the full poll(2) isn’t implemented. Another one is that uid 0 is not root on Interix. It’s actually a random number based on the SID of the Administrator or possibly system account. Another one is that need to add a check to dirent->d_ino before reading a file you have opened with readdir(). pkgsrc lists Interix as a build target so it should have patches built-in that apply fixes to these issues.
It was my understanding there were SUA Community packages (IIRC small, medium, large) that were a single download. Any idea about those?
Sorry, I meant packages as in bundles that included lots of packages.
Thanks for the reply. There is a link under ‘All Programs’ which take you to the download page for the Vista version. The link for the Windows 7 one is under ‘related resources’ and does not work. I’m sure I tried it a few weeks ago and found the page. Sorry for my ignorance, but how do you open a support ticket with Microsoft? Everything insists on Windows 10, or gives you the option of the Community, which I have tried but no one has been helpful. I would like to try and ring but I would hate being told Windows 7 doesn’t get phone support anymore. I have found pages where people have had difficulty finding the download link a few years ago, but it was working then. The one for Windows 8 is similar in size, would that work? The Way Back Machine at archive.org has an incomplete copy of the one for Windows 7, limited to 200 mb, of a ~250 mb file. Yes, I found the original link to the file itself, for x86. Yes, Windows 7 Ultimate has been expensive, accompanied with anxieties over the busy counterfeit industry.
I haven’t really opened a ticket with Microsoft in years. I’ve always done it through either a TechNet subscription or an MSDN subscription. There should be an email and phone support option somewhere on support.microsoft.com, possibly buried under a “Contact Us” link. >
I have the x64 (a.k.a. AMD64) installer in my computer, and I’m sure I also have the IA64 and x86 in my archives.
If you’re looking for the x64, I can upload to a file sharing site (let me know which one you prefer).
If you’re looking for one of the others (IA64 or x86), it’ll take a while for me to find it, but I’ll look for it.
Hi Gonzo, that sounds great. I want the x86 one. I appreciate it. Maybe I should have both x64 and x86 if that isn’t too much trouble.
Hello Gonzo, I was wondering how it went trying to find the sua files. I’m guessing you don’t have them. I much appreciated your help. I wanted the x86 one.
Sorry for the delay; busy weeks…
I found the x86 installer and I’m uploading both x86 and x64 to OneDrive (unfortunately it seems I never download IA64 version, but I doubt many people would use that anyway).
I’ll post the links once upload is complete.
Here you go:
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A1155B9A9948B532!188&authkey=!AM3lqWOnAqjrK4M&ithint=folder%2cexe
I don’t usually use OneDrive, but if this works, you should get to a folder with both installers (x86 and x64).
Please confirm if both the download and the installer works, so others can benefit.
The even earlier version for Server 2003 is also available.
Hello Gonzo, as to a file sharing site, is OneDrive possible? Otherwise something like Nitroflare.com I can use. Thanks a lot. x86 one would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Gonzo, downloads worked okay. I’m interested in those other SUA community bundles you mentioned before.
I was able to find what seems to be the community bundles via eMule and uploaded those to OneDrive.
I also found other community bundles (older?) in someone else’s OneDrive; here’s the link:
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=75562E7DA033F00A!1508&cid=75562E7DA033F00A
Pingback: Bookmarks for March 29th through March 30th : Extenuating Circumstances
Pingback: Ubuntu (not Linux) on Windows: How it works | iTelNews
Pingback: Ubuntu (not Linux) on Windows: How it works – ZDNet | Buzz Update News Trending
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-not-linux-on-windows-how-it-works/
It seems there are Microsoft links available again for the SUA.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2391.
I notice it is the same address as one of the prior non working links too. The ‘check for critical updates’ link under ‘All Programs’ goes to the above page too.
The link on this page appears wrong but goes to the above one.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771672.aspx
Release date is given as 29 March 2016. I wish I knew more of what might be going on. Though I read earlier about the bash shell working on Windows 10.
I had been on the Microsoft Community pages asking about the download, and recently got a reply with this link.
I did successfully install the file from Gonzo.
My impression is that the Subsystem for Linux is architecturally similar to the way Interix worked but with Linux ABI — specifically the Linux syscalls — and native ELF binary loading. This allows them to just use the whole unaltered Ubuntu LTS binaries instead of compiling special COFF binaries linked to the posix subsystem.
I was told years ago that there was a plan to build Linux syscalls and ELF binary loading into Interix but it was shelved and the team disbanded.
In general the idea of leveraging the Ununtu binaries is great because it solves a whole raft of problems with maintaining binaries for a weird little UNIX variant with an old API that Interix had.
It’s interesting that this is only for Windows Client now. It’s not clear to me if there is an
initprocess that runs to support daemons like there was in Interix. The use case is the reverse of Interix. Interix was about porting “legacy” UNIX code to Windows and take on new COM dependencies while Ubuntu on Windows is clearly about making Windows a viable developer platform to build services to be deployed on Linux (on Azure).The updated Microsoft link appears to be the exact same file that I got from Gonzo. I compared the sizes, and they are identical, and both have the same timestamp.
cygwin works perfect, and is properly supported, but cannot beat the speed of the old Interix subsystem. Big Windows build farms like Mozilla had to use Interix to get acceptable build times and a sane build system.
This is forthcoming
https://www.linux.com/news/bash-windows-what-does-it-mean
Pingback: The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem | 神刀安全网
Not sure I would care with Linux on commodity hardware
Pingback: Run Ubuntu Linux and Bash on Windows 10 – The Developer's Tidbits
Must be one of the few people actually using Interix. I have played with it, but it would be way too hard target for users to install.
The real fix would be dump NT for FreeBSD or something and then run Harmon.ie Mainsoft similar to what GNU/Linux and WINE does. Then can provide run time for Unix applications if desired. For now you have Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, BSDs, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and many other compatible targets so NT is irrelevant.
They could also fix the DLL hell, by having the ABI number in shared library file name and use the Unix pkg format as does Solaris and OS X. Provide wrapper ABIs for backward compatibility. See Debian .dpkg format and their policy.
Most people use slow, dumb and stupid Cygwin as it is easy to install. There is also UWIN. However, the real fix is swap out NT for something better. There is no stable target API for fork() so they do fork() in a slow, dumb and stupid, but portable way.
Threads are bad for the same reason that global variables and spaghetti gotos are bad. Use the fork() Luke.
On the subject of POSIX breakage select() and pselect() also don’t work in Mac OS X, these BSD inventions are required to provide alternation on IO. There is also poll() which uses a structure rather than a bitmap.
Another breakage is using Bash (of shell shock fame) as /bin/sh. Debian uses Dash and BSDs use their own Ash. In addition to using Bash as /bin/sh Mac OS X also has a case ignorant file system and does not follow the FHS. However, it is still easier to make stuff for Mac OS X than Microsoft Windows.
Pingback: How we got Linux on Windows | Vedalgo
Pingback: How we got Linux on Windows – Cloud Data Architect
Pingback: How we got Linux on Windows | A bunch of data
Pingback: I never really understood: what is POSIX? – CodingBlog
Pingback: What exactly is POSIX?