Microsoft recently opened a new Windows Core OS Platform blog that provides in-depth information about the foundations of Windows.
Microsoft’s Hari Pulapaka wrote in an introductory post, “The Windows Core OS Platform team is responsible for the core development of Windows systems, including virtualization platforms, silicon support (Intel, AMD, and Arm), kernels, storage file systems, and hyper-converged storage infrastructure, including Spaces Direct. This includes Spaces Direct.
In addition, we built and deployed a purpose-built Windows-based operating system for Azure Cloud,” he continued. We migrated our old blog, which was entirely focused on Windows kernels, to consolidate all the technologies the team had.
Pulapaka noted that members of the team will use the Windows Core OS Platform team blog to discuss the internals of upcoming features of the Windows Core OS platform. The first non-introductory post discusses how the team is providing a dedicated host operating system for the Azure cloud called Cloud Host.
Pulapaka explains that “Cloud Host is a purpose-built console (no GUI, also called headless by some) version of Windows, a version of Windows based on OneCore”.
OneCore is the base layer on which all Windows SKU (or version) families build their functionality. It is a set of components (executables, DLLs, etc.) required by all versions of Windows (PC, Windows Server, XBOX, or IoT).
It is the base class (e.g. Object) that all Windows classes inherit from, as opposed to programming classes. If you look inside OneCore to see what it offers, you can see the set of APIs that provide the core functionality of the kernel, hypervisor, file system support, networking, security, Win32 API, etc.
