Microsoft Shows Off Leaner "MinWin" Kernel for Next-Gen Windows

Windows has a reputation for being bloated and overly large, but Microsoft is working on radically reducing the size of the kernel for the next version of Windows, currently known as Windows 7.

For those not in the know, the kernel is basically the core portion of the OS. In a presentation focusing on virtualization at a presentation at the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois October 13th, Microsoft distinguished engineer Eric Traut went into details on the project, known internally at Microsoft as MinWin.

In his demo, Traut loaded MinWin into a virtual machine with only 40MB of RAM allocated to it. The machine booted with 7MB of RAM left.

On disk, Windows Vista uses 5,000 files and 4GB of disk space for its core, while MinWin has just 100 files and 25MB of disk space.

Traut said, "A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterization, I have to admit, so we created what we call MinWin. It's still bigger than I'd like it to be, but we've taken a shot at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we had a clean architectural layer there."

Interesting that he says it's still bigger than he wants. This would indicate still more optimization and reduction to come. Traut also said that MinWin will be the basis of all upcoming versions of Windows. This would include, as we said, Windows 7, due in 2010.

You can watch the entire one hour presentation by downloading this video.