When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, “What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?” Now, the editors think they’ve found the answer to their question.
The scoop on the Xbox 360’s embedded OS
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Wow! I really wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years! 😛
duh….
yea i dont find this overly surprising or even newsworthy and definately not a shocker…
Any site that is so absolutely biased that they intentionally censor the word Linux is not worth anyone’s time.
I thought that the X-Box 360 would be running a mainframe OS, IBM’s OS/360.
I’d hardly call that article a “scoop”
It’s useless speculation.
We yawn at this but many OSNews readers seemed to think that MS was using MacOS b/c they didn’t think Windows would run on PPC architecture. Pity on them – the Windows OS is portable despite common misperception.
It’s obvisouly running a custom build of Windows for PPC. All the Xbox 360 Dev Kits are Powermac G5s running a special PPC windows kernel.
windows 2000 originally was designed with support for RISC and of course supportted multi-processors so obviously that is what they would work from…
I was gonna comment about it, but ‘yawn’ says it all.
BTW:
“We yawn at this but many OSNews readers seemed to think that MS was using MacOS b/c they didn’t think Windows would run on PPC architecture. Pity on them – the Windows OS is portable despite common misperception.”
They are using a thing that was originally just the windows 2000 kernel very stripped, and stripped it even further (and altered it) for the xbox 360. And from that you conclude that the entire ‘windows os’ is portable. I see…
Pity on them – the Windows OS is portable despite common misperception.
Clarification, NT was designed to be portable from day 1. I believe I remember reading somewhere that early development of NT was done on 80860’s to eliminate the tendancy to use x86 specific tricks. That may be a wild rumor though.
Hank
That explains how they showed off the 360 gams on the PowerMacs
Excuse me? And you conclude that Windows is not portable b/c it takes a little extra tweaks to get windows running on another platform. Windows does phones, pdas, embedded stuff and what have you. Are you saying that the OSes they have in those platforms are not Windows OSes? I see…
I thought people knew what I was talking about. Windows NT is the only OS MS is pushing now…XP & Server 2k3 are flavors of NT. Oh well – I say the world is round and you say it’s a sphere. That’s for clarifying Hank.
I can resist a good war either. I agree it is not as portable, but one cannot say that it is not portable at all.
NT is infact a Hybrid System, employing a Microkernel which has been treated more like a Monolithic kernel, There was WinNT for PPC, Alpha & MIPS, due to MS in the early to mid-90’s thinking x86 would die out relatively quickly due to limitations of the architecture and its design.
“When even Microsoft isn’t using Windows on a high-powered device that actually has the horsepower to support it, and instead choose to follow the lead of Sony and Nintendo and continue to develop a proprietary game system OS, what does that say?”
It says you didn’t read the article.
didnt microsoft say there was a windows media eddition for Xbox 360?
I predict that Windows 2000 will gain an independent life of its own, being as it is the best OS that ever did or ever will come out of Redmond, WA. In 2020, when Longhorn XP 4000+ still comes stock with the Playskool User Interface(TM), there will still be hackers releasing patched versions of Win2k.
That really isn’t true. Various versions of Windows have been quite portable. NT 3.x was a very elegantly-designed OS that was ported to many architectures. It’s just that as Microsoft’s corporate disfunction infected the NT team’s original vision, the OS got less and less portable, and less and less elegant.
There’s probably still a lot of good stuff in the Win2k kernel. Especially if you go in and start ripping stuff out (like the XBox team has), you can probably get something quite modular and portable.
OK, from the article then:
Really, the best way to think of it is as “The Xbox 360 OS.” But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor.[/i]
How is that Windows, exactly? The NT kernel isn’t Windows. And a fork of a fork of a 6-year-old NT kernel with “sweeping changes along the way” sure isn’t Windows. Just because it has roots in other Microsoft code (it is written by Microsoft, duh) doesn’t change the fact that it’s a custom game system OS.
So who wasn’t reading?
i think that i can be a variant of xp kernel, in reality nt 5.1, but it can be based on òonghorn kernel too.
the more interesting thnig is in the end of article, that show the intention of ms to use xbox360 as a media center, with 3rd party apps. So a divorce from intel at horizon?
Jigga,
Perhaps you should be a little less defensive. I was clarifying your comment about portability by highlighting that NT wasn’t portable by accident but by design. I never stated that NT wasn’t the basis for all existing versions of Windows, and I don’t see where you would have gotten that position in my comment.
To get the kernel to run on a certain arch, basically all MS has to do is write a new HAL (hardware abstraction layer) for that hardware, the rest of the code just goes right over. Now the apps on top of the kernel need to be recompiled and such, but the kernel is extremely portable.
I love how people on this site think they even have a clue as to what they are talking about, but really don’t. This bit of information is at the beginning of just about any Windows book.
Just because you hate Microsoft doesn’t mean they can do something right, and just because you can run *nix means you know everything about computers.
Please delete my previous comment, mouse slipped.
JH:
>> Windowsfordevices.com?!?!?
When even Microsoft isn’t using Windows on a high-powered device that actually has the horsepower to support it, and instead choose to follow the lead of Sony and Nintendo and continue to develop a proprietary game system OS, what does that say?
windowssucksfordevices.com?
Uh.. but it IS a Windows OS that is heavily modified to take advantage of the hardware it will run on and get rid of all the general-use stuff that windows NEEDS to run on what it does and do what it does.
So, just because Dave Cutler was hired by Microsoft to write NT, and is still employed by them, NT is not something written by Microsoft, but, rather, by Dave Cutler?
Do you think that when a company releases a piece of software that the company as an entity just somehow creates this stuff? The employees do.
Dave Cutler, and a team that he picked, all designed and created NT while working at Microsoft.
They are using a thing that was originally just the windows 2000 kernel very stripped, and stripped it even further (and altered it) for the xbox 360. And from that you conclude that the entire ‘windows os’ is portable. I see…
All of Windows except for the HAL is supposed to be 100% platform independent. It’s been designed that way. As much as it can hurt, Windows really has a design. And apart from the Registry, a well thought one. The main sins of Windows are on UI and user management, which aren’t really part of the main design.
Now, if over time parts of Windows grew to depend on x86 specific stuff, that’s a bit of crust that has to be removed.
Not so big news here. If you been looking stuff about NT kernel you can see that they have something called HAL-layer at bottom of it. I mean it’s easy to Microsoft just write HAL for PowerPC architecture since XBox doesn’t need all feature that PC OS might need.
“and instead choose to follow the lead of Sony and Nintendo and continue to develop a proprietary game system OS, what does that say?”
Umm… Last time I checked the PS, PS2 and PS3 ran a varient of Linux, so not very proprietary, heck, Sony even let you buy Linux dev kits for the PS2 you can still check those out at playstation.com as for Nintendo, I remember them using a BSD varient so did Sega, non of these are very proprietary.
the xbox360 will surely be based on the Windows NT kernel and directx libraries, as was the original xbox.
Windows NT as already sad was designed to be portable, and is more than a VMS ripoff. During its lifetime the kernel was ported to IA32, MIPS, PowerPC, Digitals Alpha, IA64, AMD64.
Actually, many of my friends _THOUGHT_ it used linux, granted they are just gamers, not even real nerdy ones either… I’ll have to point this article out to them (I was right!).
Oh, and Just because a site is biased towards a certain OS shouldn’t mean that one shouldn’t post news about it….
I was hoping it might run BeIA.
There’s probably still a lot of good stuff in the Win2k kernel. Especially if you go in and start ripping stuff out (like the XBox team has), you can probably get something quite modular and portable.
Win2k was already portable to some degree in that there were Alpha versions right up until the last couple of RCs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/27/win2k_for_alpha_alive_well/
(at least, if you consider “has been ported” to be synonymous with “portable”)
uh, XP home is the same thing as XP pro, just has a few features removed.
MS has only one kernel now, the NT kernel, the 9x Series is long since dead.
XP Pro, Home MCE.. are on the NT 5.1 Kernel, Win2000, and Xbox1, the NT 5.0 Kernel. Windows server 2003 may be 5.1 or maybe it’s a even later version, but I don’t know. Longhorn will be NT 6.0. Its all the same for the most part aside from upgrades and patches and such.
“How is that Windows, exactly? The NT kernel isn’t Windows. And a fork of a fork of a 6-year-old NT kernel with “sweeping changes along the way” sure isn’t Windows. Just because it has roots in other Microsoft code (it is written by Microsoft, duh) doesn’t change the fact that it’s a custom game system OS.”
The NT kernel isn’t windows? then what do you think it is? Even when run without the GUI on top, it’s still windows.
Also, the Xbox2 os can be a hacked version of windowsXP which is is running on a slightly upgraded kernel. Odds are they did some syncing of updates back into the Xbox version of the OS before doing the required mods. Infact they very well went back to where they started for the first Xbox. since much of the stuff done for the first Xbox would not be needed. So you don’t start there, you go back one step to the NT5.0 kernel, or maybe even a newer version. Then make the changes needed for the new Xbox. The first step in making an XBOX OS is not the hardware port, it’s removing anything not needed from windows. So go back to that point, then do the specific steps needed for the Xbox1 or 2.
odds are things are simple, Xbox 360s OS is one step away from NT5.0, or maybe 5.1, not 2 steps (sibling of Xbox1 OS, not child). And NT5.0 is windows 2000, so how one can think it’s far removed I do not know.
Furthermore, the development kit for game makers was a Powermac running windows, and MCE is said to run on it which is a add on to winXP, so all the winXP subsystems still need to be there for it to work, which would further hint that they did the process over again starting with NT5.1 not 5.0, or they added stuff from 5.1 back to 5.0
By that token, no OS that we use today is an orignal design (not even VMS). All OSes pull from other OSes… it’s how they advance (it’s how anything in life advances).
Also, Dave Cuttler designed VMS, and is the only person to have been the creator of two commercially successful OSes.
If you don’t even know what XP is based off of, what makes you even begin to think that you know anything about the kernels of not only NT, but of other OSes?
Once again, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning to be portable, and in fact, all that needs to be done is to create a hardware abstraction layer for, in this case, PPC, and the kernel does not need to be changed.
And you conclude that Windows is not portable b/c it takes a little extra tweaks to get windows running on another platform. Windows does phones, pdas, embedded stuff and what have you. Are you saying that the OSes they have in those platforms are not Windows OSes?
The Windows NT kernel was indeed designed to be portable, but Windows CE (or whatever it’s called at the moment) is a separate development with its own kernel.
So there are in fact three OS lines that share the name Windows and the Win32 API but are very different under the hood: 95/98/ME, NT/2000/XP and WinCE.
Jigga wrote:
“We yawn at this but many OSNews readers seemed to think that MS was using MacOS b/c they didn’t think Windows would run on PPC architecture. Pity on them – the Windows OS is portable despite common misperception.”
How many other CPU architectures does it run on? x86 is it’s biggest vendor. Are you including cell phones and PDA’s?
Ok…
XP Home is a subset of XP Pro. There are a few things removed, like EFS, the ability to login to a domain, remote desktop, multi-procs, automated system recovery (on install CD), dynamic disks, and IIS.
Some ideas used in VMS were brought to NT, but it is still a VERY different kernel, and saying NT is a rip-off of it (can’t really be called a rip-off being they have the same creator) is just absurd.
Basicially, what you are saying is, just because they hire some really good talent (in this case Dave Cutler), it’s not really Microsoft software because it came from this really good programmer, but if they put out a bad piece of software comes out from them, it is Microsoft’s own work because they hired the bad talent?
Your logic just makes no sense at all.
NT has been ported to MIPS, Alpha, PPC (in the past, and now again), IA64, x86, x86-64, and IA32. Getting the kernel over to these systems is very easy. Hell, look how quickly they came out with the dev kits for the 360, which runs Windows on a Power Mac.
The things that took time for both the 64bit versions of Windows is having to recompile all the apps built on top of the kernel, then testing said apps. But at the kernel level, the only difference between any port (besides the OS version) is the HAL.
of course you also have to throw in that a lot of it is also OS/2 code/ideas….
but i thought this thread was about the XBOX
OpenVMS on XBOX!!!111oneone
I actually wasn’t going off on you Hank, I was just surprised at the previous posters comment, not yours. When I said “thanks for clarifying” I really meant thank you.
my posts are disappearing faster than i can post them
Microsoft and IBM co-devloped OS/2
did not