The Windows 2000 operating system is designed to take advantage of the many advances in processor technology. Although primarily run on the Intel architecture, Windows 2000 was designed to be portable in order to take advantage of whatever promising technologies happened to come along. Key goals for the system included portability, security, POSIX compliance, multiprocessor support, extensibility, international support, and compatibility with MS-DOS and MS-Windows applications. | Module 21: Windows 2000 I History I Design Principles I System Components I Environmental Subsystems I File system I Networking I Programmer Interface Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2002 Windows 2000 I 32-bit preemptive multitasking operating system for Intel microprocessors. I Key goals for the system: ✦ portability ✦ security ✦ POSIX compliance ✦ multiprocessor support ✦ extensibility ✦ international support ✦ compatibility with MS-DOS and MS-Windows applications. I Uses a micro-kernel architecture. I Available in four versions, Professional, Server, Advanced Server, National Server. I In 1996, more NT server licenses were sold than UNIX licenses Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2002 History I In 1988, Microsoft decided to develop a “new technology” (NT) portable operating system that supported both the OS/2 and POSIX APIs. I Originally, NT was supposed to use the OS/2 API as its native environment but during development NT was changed to use the Win32 API, reflecting the popularity of Windows . Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2002 Design Principles I Extensibility — layered architecture. ✦ Executive, which runs in protected mode, provides the basic system services. ✦ On top of the executive, several server subsystems operate in user mode. ✦ Modular structure allows additional environmental subsystems to be added without affecting the executive. I Portability — 2000 can be moved from on hardware architecture to another with relatively few changes. ✦ Written in C and C++. ✦ Processor-dependent code is isolated in a dynamic link library (DLL) called the “hardware abstraction layer” (HAL). Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2002 Design Principles (Cont.) I Reliability — 2000 uses hardware protection for virtual memory, and software protection mechanisms for operating system resources. I Compatibility — applications that .
