project David? (Rein Klazes)

[Kevin F. Quinn]

A couple of statements on their web site:

"One of the problems of the MS Windows OS is that it is subject to crash 
applications and itself. While studying the Microsoft Windows OS, we 
found the design flaw that causes this problem."

_the_ design flaw?  Marketing hype.  It seems from later statements that 
they're talking about Microsoft's decision to relocate large sections of 
previously user-land code into the kernel (in particular, GDI), much 
commented on when NT went from 3.51 to 4.0.

Later on, when comparing themselves to WINE, they state:

"SpecOpS Labs believes, that [WINE] suffers from a major architectural 
flaw, which requires a major rewrite of the WINE code. The WINE project 
had been too faithful in reverse engineering the Windows Environment 
Subsystem, that it also inherited the architectural flaws in Windows. 
Among these flaws is when a problem is experienced by an application 
running in a Window, it can crash the whole operating system, causing it 
to either hang or reboot. "

I think I'm right in saying an application using WINE _cannot_ crash the 
kernel, any more than any other user-land app.  Also, from what I 
understand, it is _not_ WINE policy to re-implement Win32 bug-for-bug 
(since Microsoft do fix bugs, this is sensible).

It looks like their project is on the search for large-scale funding. 
Assuming they can't distribute WINE code (good ol' GPL), they have a lot 
of work to do.  Their "architecture" basically means full Win32 API 
implementation, with what looks like a priviledged kernel component 
("WACS Driver") to interface to priviledged objects in the kernel. 
Incidentally, that kernel component better be rock-solid or they _will_ 
be able to kill the kernel from Windows apps in their subsystem...

They do claim to have a "prototype" - I would guess that's either a 
modified WINE, or if newly written only implements a very small subset 
of the Win32 API.  It will be interesting to see how quickly they get 
product to market, and when they do to see how much WINE code is used 
(which will need object-code comparisons, of course).  One of their 
headline comments is:

"David is not a reinvention of the wheel. It takes the best of breed 
pieces from previous attempts to simulate the Windows Subsystem, and 
integrates them into a single product."

We shall see.  There's a lot of "validation" garbage on the site, which 
to my mind isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.

It could well be they'll just raise loads of cash, then later crash and 
burn when they realise quite how much effort they need to spend to 
reimplement everything - or maybe when they realise they'll be violating 
the GPL if they lift WINE code.

Kev.