1/17/2021
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`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
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`BIZ & IT —OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally
`happened
`
`Microsoft promised developers that Windows would run anywhere. This summer, it finally will.
`
` - 5/20/2016, 4:00 AM
`ARS STAFF
`
`As one fades away, another enters the scene
`
`This brush-clearing made things easier for third-party developers, but it didn't do much to help Microsoft. Internally, the trifurcation soon happened once
`again thanks to a thing called the Xbox. The original Xbox operating system was a fork of Windows 2000. When Microsoft made the fork, the approach was
`what Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Don Box called "fork and run." Rather than keeping the Xbox operating system synchronized with the mainstream
`development of Windows 2000 (and its successors), the Xbox operating system was left free to diverge.
`
`Again, this was a decision that made a lot of sense in the moment. The Xbox operating system is designed to be more predictable than desktop Windows,
`so for example it lacks most of Windows' demand-based paged virtual memory. In Windows on a PC, the operating system can move the memory used by
`one application from RAM to the pagefile on disk, thereby freeing up the RAM so that another application can use it. This action comes at the expense of
`making the first application slow down, as using that data means waiting for it to be read from the disk. This is useful on a PC since it allows many
`applications to run concurrently even if they use more memory than the system has. But such a setup is bad on a games console; that slow wait for the
`disk means performance drops, causing frame rates to stutter. So the Xbox operating system drops the capability entirely.
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`Similarly, Xbox doesn't have any great need to multitask. Turn on an original Xbox and it boots into the Xbox operating system, but as soon as you start a
`game, the operating system mostly unloads to free up memory for the game itself. Quit the game and the operating system loads back up again. This style
`of operation (which is oddly similar to the way DOS used to work) made sense in a single-purpose console, but it made no sense in a more general-
`purpose operating system.
`
`The Xbox 360 operating system didn't do much to change this, either. Though released in 2005, its operating
`system was not synchronized with Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 (the latest iterations of the Windows
`NT kernel). Instead, it was a continuation of the Windows 2000-derived Xbox operating system.
`
`FURTHER READING
`Xbox 360: the Ars Technica Review
`
`When the Windows Everywhere vision was first articulated, a games console was not on the cards. For much of the Xbox platform's life, it was a special
`thing all on its own. It happened to run a Windows-derived operating system, but it was never an application platform in the way that Windows 95,
`Windows NT, and Windows CE were. It wasn't a Win32 platform.
`
`Pushing the limits
`
`Email address
`
`Patent Owner, Bot M8 LLC - Ex. 2017, p. 1
`
`

`

`1/17/2021
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`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
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`https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/2/
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`2/6
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`Over on the phone, the wheels were starting to come off Windows CE. After being very early to the idea of "a phone that can run applications" with the
`Windows CE-based Windows Mobile, Microsoft was rather late to "a phone that can run applications running an operating system that people like to use."
`Belatedly realizing that Windows Mobile, with its scaled-down Windows 95 lookalike interface and dependence on itty bitty styluses, was never going to
`win hearts and minds, Microsoft came up with Windows Phone 7.
`
`Out of necessity, this was built on top of Windows CE: Windows CE was where Microsoft had a telephony
`stack, Windows CE ran on ARM processors, and Windows CE worked on small systems with limited RAM and
`storage. Microsoft needed to get something to market as fast as it could, and it was much easier to use an
`operating system that already had all these fundamental capabilities rather than starting from scratch or
`beating Windows NT into shape. As such, Windows Phone 7 hit the market in 2010.
`
`FURTHER READING
`Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review
`
`Cognizant of the fact that its latecomer platform had to be developer-friendly, Windows Phone 7 wasn't a Win32 platform (at least as far as third-party
`developers were concerned). Microsoft instead went where most of its third party developers actually were: .NET. The Windows Phone 7 developer model
`was based, more or less, on Silverlight, the cut-down version of .NET that was once promoted as a competitor to the Flash browser plugin.
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`As a time-to-market compromise, this was another decision that made sense. But it also proved to be deeply limiting. It wasn't long before dual (or more)
`core smartphone processors started showing up, which Windows CE didn't support. While Windows CE had improved over the years, moving from the
`32MB memory slice model to something more like Windows 95, it was nonetheless limiting. The lack of strong security and multicore support in particular
`were untenable moving forward. The not-quite-Win32 API meant that it couldn't run the same full Silverlight as found on the desktop, or the full Internet
`Explorer rendering engine. Windows Phone had rapidly outgrown Windows CE, giving Microsoft a new dilemma. Should it build Windows CE up to make it
`better placed to handle the new demands placed on it, or should it cut Windows NT down to make it fit onto a phone?
`
`Apps for Xbox
`
`Enlarge / The Xbox 360's 2011 dashboard update.
`
`Microsoft
`
`Meanwhile, the Xbox team wanted to make the Xbox 360 into something more of an application platform. The Xbox 360 received a major update to its
`operating system and user interface in late 2011, picking up new streaming media capabilities such as a YouTube app. A second update in 2012 added a
`Web browser.
`
`In both cases, Microsoft reused its own technology, using Silverlight for apps and Internet Explorer for the browser. The Xbox's forked operating system
`made this much harder to do, however. Internet Explorer and Silverlight were built to run on real desktop Windows, a Windows that had been under
`continuous development ever since the Xbox team forked Windows 2000. To get these things onto the Xbox 360, the Xbox team ended up having to fork
`them and rework them to fit the constraints and capabilities of the games console.
`
`Forking the browser in this way was far from ideal. Browsers are regularly updated pieces of software due to their rich variety of exploitable software bugs.
`Creating a fork of the browser meant that those security fixes would have to be forked, too; the Xbox 360 can't just use the same fixes that regular
`
`Patent Owner, Bot M8 LLC - Ex. 2017, p. 2
`
`

`

`1/17/2021
`
`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
`
`https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/2/
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`3/6
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`Windows uses. The same was true, perhaps less visibly, of the Silverlight implementation.
`
`Maintaining a forked version of a piece of software takes work: changes coming from the upstream origin have to be ported and, from time to time, fixed
`to accommodate the differences that the fork imposes. Microsoft hadn't been really paying this price with the core Xbox operating system. Instead, it
`allowed the two operating systems to become increasingly different. This resulted in a certain amount of parallel development. Windows 2000, for
`example, didn't natively support Wi-Fi connectivity. That was added in Windows XP. Accordingly, when Wi-Fi was added to the Xbox, the Xbox team couldn't
`just take the Windows XP Wi-Fi support, because that depended on many of the divergent changes made during Windows XP's development. Instead, they
`had to develop their own Wi-Fi support just for Xbox OS.
`
`The same parallel development afflicted Windows CE, too. As a separate operating system, it also needed its own Wi-Fi stack. Windows Phone 7 included
`its own fork of Internet Explorer, and so on and so forth.
`
`This was tolerable for a long time. But by late 2010—after Windows Phone 7 shipped and as the Xbox 360 update was being developed—it became
`increasingly clear that the cost and complexity was becoming prohibitive: three operating system kernels, three sets of new hardware support, three
`forked browsers, three versions of Win32, three graphical stacks and versions of DirectX. The overheads add up.
`
`It wasn't much good for third parties, either. Windows Phone app development was quite different from Win32 app development. For the Xbox One,
`Microsoft had the ambition of opening up its console as an application platform, but the fork and porting experience of bringing Silverlight and Internet
`Explorer to the Xbox 360 made it clear that the Xbox could no longer stand alone as its own thing. It had to be compatible with other Microsoft platforms,
`both to offer a consistent developer experience for third parties and to be a tractable maintenance experience for Redmond itself.
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`As the Phone team was developing Windows Phone 8 in 2011 and 2012, the Xbox team worked on the Xbox One in 2012 and 2013. Soon it became clear to
`both groups that the triple operating system strategy was not working out. The Phone team needed a modern, fully featured operating system to handle
`their hardware and application support needs. Windows CE could have probably been stretched to last another generation or two (and in fact, it did gain
`limited support for multiple cores and lose the 32MB memory slice design), but Windows NT was obviously the more capable, more robust platform to
`build on. The Xbox team needed to be running mainline Windows so that they could support a rich application ecosystem. The costs and limitations of
`being independent were becoming prohibitive.
`
`Meanwhile, in the Windows division....
`
`Patent Owner, Bot M8 LLC - Ex. 2017, p. 3
`
`

`

`1/17/2021
`
`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
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`https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/2/
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`4/6
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`Manu Cornet
`
`Enlarge / The org chart comic isn't exactly right, but it wasn't exactly wrong, either.
`
`While the Phone and Xbox teams were doing their things, the Windows team was doing its thing. The widely propagated joke of the Microsoft org chart
`with a bunch of divisions pointing guns at each other encapsulated a certain truth about the company; Phone, Xbox, and Desktop were separate groups,
`with separate developers, separate responsibilities, and separate goals despite everyone working together for Microsoft. The Windows team wasn't writing
`an operating system for phones or for games consoles; it was writing one for desktop and server computers.
`
`Fortunately, the Windows team had embarked on a project that would become instrumental in creating a common platform for all these various demands.
`That project is already widely known—it was called MinWin—if not necessarily widely understood.
`
`Remember that Windows in the server room was once seen as a bold new market for Microsoft. But by the time of Windows Server 2003's release, this
`focus was well established. With that, however, came an increasing desire to make Windows more Linux-like in many ways. Linux server systems can be
`pared down to remove unnecessary packages and hence reduce the security surface area; they can also be managed fully from the command line. There
`were increasingly calls to enable comparable things in Windows.
`
`Simultaneously, there was a desire to make Windows development itself more manageable. Windows NT had grown sprawling and complex, with many
`different interdependencies between components. Microsoft was discovering this made it very hard to predict the impact of changes to the core operating
`system. Work in one area would unexpectedly have impact on other parts of the operating system, making isolated development impossible.
`
`The plan with MinWin was to repackage and reorganize the operating system to untangle these interdependencies and create an operating system that
`was much more amenable to rapid innovation without knock-on effects. This work had to be done in such a way as to not break existing applications. The
`core Windows APIs are organized into DLLs that applications consume. These DLLs can combine features from many different subsystems—kernel32.dll,
`for example, spans file handling, creating processes and threads, managing memory, loading other libraries, querying certain properties of the system
`hardware, and many other tasks besides. Microsoft needed to respect and retain this bundling while still enabling separate development.
`
`The interdependencies were particularly acute in areas such as the shell and the browser. These are high-level components, but low-level components
`often took dependencies on them. Taking these dependencies wasn't elegant, but it was often convenient. Such functionality was useful and also efficient,
`as it meant reusing the same code and saving on both disk and memory footprint.
`
`The MinWin project painstakingly analyzed the various dependencies within Windows and broke the operating system down into a bunch of components.
`These were strictly layered to ensure that low-level components never depended on higher-level ones. Dependencies had to strictly flow from high level to
`low. That way, high-level parts could be safely modified without breaking lower-level parts and without those changes rippling to the broader operating
`system.
`
`The APIs themselves were also broken down and divided into much more focused units. Portions of this are visible if you go poking around the Windows
`directories; there are lots of DLLs with names starting api-ms-win and ext-ms-win, with each of these DLLs listing the functions that govern a particular
`piece of functionality.
`
`Patent Owner, Bot M8 LLC - Ex. 2017, p. 4
`
`

`

`1/17/2021
`
`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
`
`https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/2/
`
`5/6
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`Enlarge / One of the few manifestations of MinWin is all these weirdly named DLLs.
`
`The MinWin name is also used, more specifically, to refer to a minimal kernel, networking stack, storage, and other low-level components. Add in Windows
`update, the security and authentication infrastructure, device handling, and a few more pieces, and you have CoreSystem.
`
`Page: 1 2 3 Next →
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`Patent Owner, Bot M8 LLC - Ex. 2017, p. 5
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`1/17/2021
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`OneCore to rule them all: How Windows Everywhere finally happened | Ars Technica
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`https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecore-to-rule-them-all-how-windows-everywhere-finally-happened/2/
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`Modern Vintage Gamer Reacts To His Top 1000
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