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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Technology
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You're relying on windows for critical infrastructure? Are you nuts?
Linux can also die in weird ways...
It's just that Windows is more prone to some issues.
Indeed, nothing is perfect, but closed source stuff doesn't provide a lot of recourse. If you have a linux expert in your team, they can investigate and if need be even dig into the code of linux itself to find the core issue. Microsoft doesn't provide anything even remotely similar.
How many dev teams have a kernel dev on them?
Don't need one. If you can read C/C++ you can read the kernel code. And in most cases, you won't have to, as the problem is probably in a component in the distro. Those are written in python, ruby, or bash, which are all much more readable than C/C++.
No such luck on windows
I worked at a small company without a kernel dev and we periodically looked into the code to solve problems. I don't know how much we upstreamed, but we relied on Linux so it was either the or try to get someone on the mailing list to care.
It's really not that hard to look through the kernel source, it's pretty well written and documented. It's a lot harder to be a kernel developer writing new code, but finding bugs and contributing fixes isn't that bad.
You don't have to be a kernel dev for that. Reading source code is much easier than writing it. I myself have even read the code that handles the battery management drivers, and it's mostly self documenting, even though I'm bad at C and it's pointers, and also have never yet written a kernel driver.
The US navy ran on windows xp for so long that they paid Microsoft to continue maintaining it after EOL.