Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10

Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by ChuckMcM on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @11:34AM (#15906877)

Well not if you aren't using other parts of Windows :-) but if you are constrained to using Windows for other reasons then the advantage is you get all the tools with a much lighter weight system than say running a virtual machine.

There are also some systems where kernel support for the devices is lagging, either because they are proprietary and poorly documented or because they have insufficient market penetration to get someone interested in writing good driver support. For example support for the pen on the Surface Pro 4 line is really horrible (IMHO) on Linux.

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by pjungwir on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @12:15PM (#15907303)

So these devices need real kernel drivers? Windows doesn't provide some kind of emulation through its own drivers? I guess that makes sense although it didn't occur to me.

If that's true, will those new drivers also work on a regular non-Windows Linux install? That would be really great news, and pretty ironic, if device manufacturers or even Microsoft itself were suddenly writing more/better drivers for the Linux kernel. :-)

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by noselasd on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @01:29PM (#15908090)

The grandparent is saying that if you run plain Ubuntu directly on a device, Ubuntu (or really, the Linux kernel) might not have drivers that work reasonably well for some hardware on that device, while Windows most certainly does have decent drivers for that hardware.

When you run Ubuntu on top of windows, windows replaces/emulates the Linux kernel - at least the part it needs to run the subset of Ubuntu that windows currently can - this emulation provided to run Ubuntu is done on the interface between the kernel and userspace, it is not done on a device/driver level.

Drivers are OS specific, the drivers in question here are either windows drivers, which works only on windows, or they are linux drivers which work only on linux. (Noone is writing drivers for windows which could also work on linux)

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by slededit on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @02:40PM (#15908771)

It's not an emulator. The NT kernel really does support the necessary system calls.

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by noselasd on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @04:10PM (#15909502)

Sure, but there's a layer that emulates the linux syscalls. Though perhaps it's more appropriate to call it "translates" instead of emulate.

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by slededit on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @05:24PM (#15910064)

Its not a layer on top of the NT system call infrastructure. Its brand new NT system calls that do exactly what the equivalent Linux ones do. There is no combination of win32 NT system calls that will get you the behavior of fork().

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by gmueckl on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @06:11PM (#15910386)

Aren't the NT system calls also just a personality module above the actual NT kernel? The kernel was originally designed to provide multiple kinds of user spaces so that it could run OS/2 programs alongside Win32 ones.

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by slededit on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @06:19PM (#15910446)

No. win32 is a personality, the underlying ntdll calls are not part of that.

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Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 by aruggirello on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @05:51PM (#15910225)

Of course not! It's quite the opposite. With more and more people ditching 'real' Linux for WSL (which is a 'Linux kernel API layer' for the Windows kernel, there is actually NO Linux kernel involved), support for the relevant hardware is never going to happen in Linux proper.

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