Microsoft Windows: what you need to know about next steps – TechRepublic

Microsoft isn’t calling Windows 10X (and the dual-screen Windows tablets it powers) a “ reimagination ” of Windows as it did with Windows RT and the first Surface tablet. Instead, it’s an “ evolution ” of Windows 10 to respond to new dual-screen devices from Microsoft and OEMs like Dell and HP.

Windows 10X is much more restrictive than the ARM64 version of Windows 10, which is just Windows running on an Arm processor, although it cannot (yet) run x64 applications. It is both more and less restrictive than Windows RT or Windows 10 S Mode. Unlike Windows RT, 10X can run most Windows desktop applications. Unlike Windows in S mode, it’s not limited to running apps from the Windows Store: you’ll be able to install apps from the web or a USB drive, and code shouldn’t be signed – but it should have a “good reputation” (reputation will be based on Microsoft’s security graphics and will work much like Windows Defender Smart Screen).

But Mode S supports system tray apps like the OneNote desktop screen clipper, while Windows 10X doesn’t allow them. It also does not allow file explorer add-ins or global keyboard shortcuts beyond those built into Windows. Not having startup tasks and blocking tools like registry cleaners will improve performance and keep it from degrading over time.

Windows 10X is designed for security and isolation, running all traditional Win32 applications in a container (actually a lightweight virtual machine), separating the state of applications and drivers from the operating system itself (with all system files, registry keys, and other data for an application written to an application data folder in the Win32 container rather than in the operating system) and making the operating system read-only. This speeds up updates and means you don’t need as many anti-malware scans – which further improves performance.

Windows 10X takes Windows 8 desktop activity moderation (DAM) much further: DAM only started when an Always On device was turned on, but the screen was off. Windows 10X will allocate more resources to applications running in the foreground, suspend background tasks, including NT services, reduce resources allocated to Win32 and MSIX applications when their windows are not visible on the screen and will completely suspend them when their windows are minimized or closed. This is part of the way Windows can control a device with two screens (always energy-consuming components) without draining the battery.

A window

UWP applications already have better performance, longer battery life and better security, but they have not completely displaced the Win32 desktop applications. Windows 10X is Microsoft’s latest attempt to create a modern, mobile and more secure operating system that will serve as a device that you can take with you like an iPad that is also a PC that will run most – but not all – of your PC applications.

But the Windows Core OS (WCOS) job is much broader than Microsoft’s latest approach to a tablet operating system. OneCore is the common parts of Windows that go into Xbox and HoloLens as well as Windows, and that will build on WCOS.

WCOS is also about how Azure builds on Windows Server. There is a growing range of hardware available in Azure, from FPGAs that power certain networking and machine learning services, to GPU-powered virtual machines for data scientists, to “ dumb ” servers 12 TB to run SAP HANA). Then there is the way OS server updates are made as hot fixes with so little downtime that the Ethernet connection may not be interrupted. All of this means that updating Azure is more complicated than installing a new version of Windows Server. A more modular, fully composable and component operating system that separates core functionality such as the kernel and networking stack from other areas of the system facilitates these updates, but will also benefit many other systems based on Windows.

Microsoft previously announced an upgrade of the Surface Hub 2X for the Surface Hub 2S to allow you to rotate the screen and distribute multiple hubs to create a larger display, by upgrading the CPU and GPU with a processor cartridge. However, according to one webinar leak, adding mosaic and rotation may not need a hardware upgrade after all. The same WCOS job that allows two screens for Windows 10X might be enough to do the same for Surface Hub, but it won’t be in the 2020 H1 update for Surface Hub, which focuses on deployment and management features for IT services.

Windows 10X is not a replacement for Windows 10 as it is specifically targeted as a mobile tablet operating system for devices where safety and battery life are top priorities. But the WCOS developments that underlie Windows 10X will go into future versions of Windows 10. Microsoft has not yet confirmed whether they will appear in the 2020 H2 version of Windows or, more likely, in the 2021 H1 version. The company is now officially talking about a “small fall update and a full spring update”, which has a longer business support lifecycle (30 months). Major changes like this are more likely in the spring updates.

The 2020 H1 update doesn’t have a lot of major features, but brings a range of useful improvements: better Bluetooth pairing; use Windows search to populate the search area in file explorer; login without password and ability to use Windows Hello PIN code to login in safe mode; the ability to reset Windows from the cloud rather than needing a local recovery partition; more useful network status information; see the GPU temperature in the task manager; and make it easier to find options for restarting applications that you run before restarting Windows.

Windows 10X also supports upcoming Intel processors, which mix big and small cores – a combination that Arm has been offering for some time – to reduce power consumption. Demanding software will use a large kernel, but less demanding applications can run on the small kernel. This is something we plan to see also support for Windows 10.

Integrated scheduler, separate interface controls

The biggest novelty in the first half of 2020 will be WSL 2, which essentially relies on the same Krypton containers as Docker on Windows or Windows Sandbox to run the Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine that shares resource management and planning with the Windows kernel. This improves both Linux performance and compatibility compared to the original WSL approach.

After creating similar lightweight Hyper-V systems for Docker, Windows Defender Application Guard (which has its own kernel) and the Windows sandbox, the Hyper-V team decided to use the Host Compute Service API in Hyper -V as a platform to allow different Microsoft teams to create their own versions. These Krypton containers do not have their own copy of the kernel32 module (which exposes kernel services to the Win32 environment in Windows) nor their own memory allocation and scheduler. They get a read-only version of the same Windows binaries that are already running, so you don’t have to wait for an operating system to boot. They direct the card into memory where kernel32 is running on the host and get memory from the standard Windows memory manager. And their workloads are scheduled by the standard Windows scheduler, so that it can freeze threads and suspend processes inside the virtual machine.

This prevents virtual machines from needing large amounts of memory or slowing down the system, and the connection to the container (which uses the familiar Remote Desktop protocol) is protected by Control Flow Guard to prevent it from being abused by an attacker.

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Microsoft has not confirmed whether Krypton is what powers Win32 containers on Windows 10X, with group program director Andrew Clinick saying only that “the Win32 container is built using much of the same technology as WSL”. But whether it’s Krypton or some other slight variation, that’s how Microsoft is able to get the combination of performance and battery life, and that’s certainly what’s behind an increasing number virtualized features in Windows that improve security while maintaining more compatibility than the 10X.

Then there is the way WinUI 3 separates the Windows UI platform (which Microsoft and third-party developers can use for UWP and Win32 applications) from the shipping versions of Windows.

Previously, WinUI controls and APIs were part of the Windows SDK, which ships twice a year with the semi-annual channel versions of Windows and also includes changes to the application platform (such as the suspend model , resume or run background applications). Now the new UI controls will be delivered more often than Windows, in the same way that the new Chromium-based Edge browser is delivered every six weeks rather than just when Windows gets an update. This means that integrated applications such as Mail and Calculator could also change their interface without a new version of Windows coming out, because the interface components are decoupled from the Windows version.

Some of these changes will also be made to older versions of Windows, because if developers choose, some WinUI applications can run in the new Edge browser using WebAssembly and the Uno platform, on Windows 7 and 8 , or even on a Mac. It won’t change an app like Calculator on Windows 7, but it gives businesses a strategy to take advantage of new Windows options without excluding users of older versions of Windows. WinUI is even becoming open-source, so the Xamarin, React Native and Flutter applications that run on Windows 10 and 10X will essentially be UWP applications.

As an operating system developed for almost 30 years, Windows is a complex system and some internal elements are still not fully documented, which complicates the work in progress to improve isolation and modularization. The much-overlooked MinWin was actually part of the internal job of documenting Windows internal interfaces and refactoring interfaces so that applications calling, for example, the audio stack don’t have to reach in kernel mode but can speak to a high level API.

Windows 10X sacrifices some compatibility for security and battery life, especially by removing system tray tools and third-party system-wide keyboard shortcuts. But WCOS ‘work of further separating Windows into components that can be assembled in different ways will appear in many other places in 2020 and beyond.

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