MinWin: the New Windows Kernel
MinWin: the New Windows Kernel
One of Microsoft s main OS designers Eric Traut had a demo of the next version of the Windows Kernel. Traut ran a stripped-down version of Windows 7 called “MinWin” that included only the core kernel. For the first time Windows NT has been seen without even a GUI. It ran only a miniature web server that would display simple HTML pages including some pages that showed the task list and other properties of MinWin itself. Thirteen tasks were running smss.exe csrss.exe and svchost.exe were all there plus the mini web server httpsrv.exe. The OS ran under Virtual PC and this allowed Traut to show the audience exactly how many resources it was consuming: about 25MB on disk and 40MB of RAM. The OS booted up in about 20 seconds inside Virtual PC. This is remarkably small for Windows. Traut said that he would “still like to see it get smaller.”
