The article pretends to answer why they're using Linux instead of the NT kernel, but the answer is either incomplete or a non sequitur; it seems to imply that since the devices has very little power, their kernel isn't a good fit. I thought the NT kernel was pretty good at low power, and also has a highly respected internal design?
Low power is relative: NT is good at saving battery on laptops, but these are supercomputers compared to IoT hardware. The most minimal NT system that I have seen so far was still 50MB. Not sure if MS was able to shrink that further. But in a world where every byte of flash or RAm saved can lead to essential power savings, this is far too big. With a custom linux kernel with no extra drivers and modules and busybox in userspace, you can get much smaller than 50MB.
>The most minimal NT system that I have seen so far was still 50MB.
Well, it depends on what you want to do.
A really minimal XP with minlogon is around 10 Mb (actually around 20 MB that on NTFS compressed volumes are around 10), of which quite a bit is things that could be removed or greatly reduced in size recompiling the programs/dll's if the source was available, that won't do much, while with a decent amount of base tools it comes out at 30-40 MB or so.
Good point; but if I’m reading the article correctly, it sounds like it’s because the Linux kernel is open source:
> The Microsoft-secured Linux kernel used in the Azure Sphere IoT OS is shared under an OSS license so that silicon partners can rapidly enable new silicon innovations.” And those partners are also very comfortable with taking an open-source release and integrating that with their products.
I think it’d be cool if they released an open-source NT kernel for this, for diversity of kernels and because of NT’s reputation like you mentioned previously, but maybe they’re betting on there being many more engineers with Linux-based IoT development experience.
As an aside, really impressed with Microsoft recently. I’m still grossed out by the privacy policy of Windows 10, but it really seems like they’ve come up with an excellent strategy for the next decade.
For a while it was basically free (as in beer) up to an absurdly high volume (IIRC, million-ish devices?).
Maybe you are correct that there might not be a huge interest unless the solution is also free as in speech simply because of auditing needs of some of the IoT manufacturers.
I think MS looked at the market and thought, well linux already owns the IoT market and doesn't care to take it on.
MS would have to spend money and effort to get NT to be where linux is already, then spend more money and more effort to get people to adopt NT for IoT. In the end, there is no profit in being the OS for IoT.
Instead MS opts to have IoT pay cloud fees for Azure. It helps grow their cloud efforts and profits from existing investments. They don't have to fight linux, just work with it.
Drastically simplified source access for the silicon partners seems more important for the business case. I agree the power aspect, absent more specifics, sounds wrong.
