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Microsoft Linux

Microsoft Working on Porting Sysinternals To Linux (zdnet.com) 183

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A Microsoft exec has confirmed yesterday that the company's engineers are working on porting the highly popular Sysinternals software package to Linux. Microsoft engineers have already ported the ProcDump utility and are currently working on porting ProcMon as well. More tools to follow.

Microsoft's decision to port this highly popular debugging utility to Linux comes after two months ago, in September, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, revealed that "sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." With Linux's growing adoption as the preferred OS for running Azure VMs, it's only natural that Azure engineers are now looking into porting their favorite debugging utilities to Linux, for both themselves but also for the company's customers.
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Microsoft Working on Porting Sysinternals To Linux More

Microsoft Working on Porting Sysinternals To Linux

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  • How pointless is that (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fisted ( 2295862 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:15AM (#57593884)

    This is actually funny and sad. Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default? This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux.

    smh

    • Re:How pointless is that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:21AM (#57593926)

      Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default?

      No.

      This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux

      Correct. However, no one wants to really learn how to use those tools. So that's where the demand for this comes from.

      I guess the question, Should folks learn these tools? Should folks educate themselves? is the underlying question here. I know exactly how I feel but, how I feel doesn't change the mentality one bit.

      • Re:How pointless is that (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:33AM (#57594002)

        There is at least some benefit in having their entire team using a single tool across platforms. Apparently deemed worth the porting effort, anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )

        Correct. However, no one wants to really learn how to use those tools.

        The premise here is people switching their OS, isn't it? I'd say the people who don't want to learn how to use new tools would also not want to learn how to use a new OS?

        • Re:How pointless is that (Score:4, Insightful)

          by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:14PM (#57594330)

          I'd say the people who don't want to learn how to use new tools would also not want to learn how to use a new OS?

          One would think so. However, a lot of higher ups that would make the call to change the OS are not really concerned about the means, but more of the ends. So they see blah blah in marketing indicating Linux versus Windows, they instruct their underlings to get it done, and allocate all of zero time to the underlings getting properly trained. So the underlings resort to StackExchange to get day-to-day stuff done, wishing for a day where they could just use the tools they know to get day-to-day done. In this kind of environment you've got a statistical break. X% group will eventually pick things up by enough visits to Google, Y% will actually pick up a book and learn (maybe on their own dime outside of work), and Z% will just complain "Why can't this be easier?!" (incorrectly, mind you). It appears that Z% has tickled someone in the MS research department.

          Project managers and the folks calling shots just see Apache, Tomcat, node.js, or whatever the ends are. Underlings are the ones actually dealing with the details Apache on Linux vs Apache on Windows.

      • This is one step, not the goal. Someone got confus (Score:5, Funny)

        by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:21PM (#57594358) Journal

        I think there are two possible explanations for this.

        Most likely:
        The boss figured out there is no reason for Microsoft to keep developing their own kernel when they can just slap their UI on top of Linux. The boss said "port the system internals to Linux". A programmer got confused and ported SysInternals", the toolkit for seeing the system internals.

        Also likely:

        The eventual goal is to switch the system internals to Linux.
        In Agile fashion, Microsoft figured they'd start with a bite-sizdd chunk work that feels like it might be kinda going in that direction. It won't actually be used in the end, because it wasn't planned out, it was Scrumed.

        • Everyone here is dumber for having read your theory.

        • I kind of wonder if Microsoft actually *has* considered this and how much work it would actually take to port the UI to Linux. I'm guessing at some point it's a weird bastard with just the kernal calls swapped but most of the shared code still in external dynamic libraries.

      • This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux

        Correct. However, no one wants to really learn how to use those tools. So that's where the demand for this comes from.

        I guess the question, Should folks learn these tools? Should folks educate themselves? is the underlying question here. I know exactly how I feel but, how I feel doesn't change the mentality one bit.

        From anything false, anything follows.

        No one wants to pay employees enough money to learn what the employees willingly learn themselves, unless they can see an immediate profit from it. The false assumption that the thing with more restrictions, including price and licensing, is therefor the better thing means that Microsoft can continue to attempt embrace, extend, and extinguish simply by having more restrictive licensing when extending a Free product. Anyone who complains about restrictions imposed by th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dougmc ( 70836 )

        Should folks learn these tools? Should folks educate themselves?

        That's definitely a fair way of looking at the issue.

        I certainly do install cygwin on Windows boxes rather than learn how to really use all the stuff that Windows has to offer natively ...

        (I know how to use some of it, but ... for the more complicated stuff, I tend to do it in cygwin because it's easier.)

    • Re:How pointless is that (Score:5, Informative)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:28AM (#57593972)

      To be fair, procmon is a pretty nifty GUI and can show you a lot of information in one place. More info than top.

      One thing that's always bothered me on windows is the lack of a simple way to determine what DLLs are missing. A missing shared library in linux will be apparent with an error message from the linker when you try to run the executable. Or you can use the ldd command to determine what shared libraries it links to and whether they can be found on the system. On Windows, you just get an error dialog box that says the program won't run, with no information about what is missing. And it's not easy to find out what the missing dlls are either. You have to resort to DLL dependency walkers. In terms of tools Windows is a bizarre mix of complete deficiencies and the fanciest GUI tools.

      Anyway it will be interesting to see what they come up with. The mere fact they want to port these highly OS-specific tools to Linux is very interesting, given MS's history with Linux. And we should be in favor of any tools that ease the transition away from a proprietary OS to something more open.

      • Re:How pointless is that (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:38AM (#57594054)

        port these highly OS-specific tools to Linux

        I'm thrilled to finally have regmon.exe on Linux. That's gonna be a life saver when systemd-registryd is rolled out!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by higuita ( 129722 )

          you already have that in gnome dconf

          Just try it, type "dconf-editor"

          That is why many people say that gnome is the linux "windows", one size fits all, they are always right, everyone else must follow then and even include a registry! :D

          • However ugly gconf is it's at least not a big binary blob of a database like the Windows registry.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by higuita ( 129722 )

              uhhhmm ... lets use file... /home/higuita/.config/dconf/user: GVariant Database file, version 0

              yes, you are correct, it is a big binary gvariant database, totally different! ;)

              This because "apps" need to constantly check for their configs instead of loading a text file on startup... loading a text file every 5s is slow and adding some reload menu option is ugly, so lets use a binary blog so it is 30% faster!

              • a fuck, I was almost sure that it was in xml. Must have thought about something else.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by higuita ( 129722 )

                  previous gnome versions used gconf, that where many xml files ... as they were many and xml is not that easy to parse, it was slower than it needed to be... that was why they went the binary format for dconf (again, instead of simplifying/reverting to simpler and fewer text files like ini, yml, json) :)

      • ProcMon will show you file access attempts to find a DLL

        • > ProcMon will show you file access attempts to find a DLL

          systemtap and dtrace not good enough for you?

      • ProcMon and Top have different uses. I think you are thinking of Process Explorer. ProcMon logs file accesses, registry accesses, and network activity. Very useful for analyzing process behavior and debugging a non-working application.

        • Re:How pointless is that (Score:4, Insightful)

          by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @02:58PM (#57595452) Journal

          ProcMon logs file accesses, registry accesses, and network activity.

          So equivalent to strace?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rastos1 ( 601318 )
            strace does not tell you what process accessed the file specified by the filename (I think inotifywait can do that). Or what was the full commandline of process, that produced the event, and is now gone. And it is kind of difficult to track down the IP address and port from socket descriptor (though you can get much information from tcpdump).

      • What are you talking about? It's been years since I've needed to go DLL hunting but every single program has told me what was missing.

        • I do application compatibility work. Part of that is helping customers move applications to newer machines when the original install media has been lost or (for homebrew apps) never existed.

          I go DLL fishing on a regular basis, and dependency walker (depends.exe) and Process Monitor (Procmon.exe) are lifesavers.

          (I work for Microsoft supporting Enterprise Customers. A very small part of my job is helping customers get that last blocker-application moved off of /win[ntxp0-9]{,4}/ so they can finally upgrade

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          Good for you. You're must not be a developer. Or one that deals with cross-platform developing and deployment including cross compiling. Most build systems have pretty good tools for making sure all the right dlls are bundled with the executable, but sometimes there are problems. As well as the kinds of things the other poster posted about.

          I'm very glad you haven't had to deal with these issues. But they are very real and Windows doesn't make it super easy to track them down.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Or you can use the ldd command to determine what shared libraries it links to and whether they can be found on the system.
        [...]
        You have to resort to DLL dependency walkers.

        What's ldd other than a dependency walker?

        I think part of the difference is that under Windows, the mentality is that the publisher of a particular application is responsible for quality control as to the inclusion of shared libraries needed to make the application operate on a freshly installed copy of Windows. If you're missing a library, you're supposed to get it from the installer that the publisher provided. If an application fails to run after its installer has completed, its installer is inadequate,

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          It's not a dependency walker in the Windows sense. ldd simply parses the executable and spits out all the shared libraries the linker is going to need to find to load the executable because they are all listed there. In Windows this information can't always be found by simply looking at the executable because dlls themselves can refer to other dlls. So you figure out you're missing dll A but when you copy it in, now the whole system is missing dll B and so on. A dependency walker has to, well walk the

    • Re:How pointless is that (Score:4, Insightful)

      by llamalad ( 12917 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:37AM (#57594052)

      I see we're well into the "extend" phase now.

      • I see we're well into the "extend" phase now.

        Exactly!

      • Re:How pointless is that (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mangastudent ( 718064 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:00PM (#57594668)
        In their favor, it's MIT licensed. That's hard to abuse in a way negative for Linux except by using patents.

        • "We just want to extend the functionality of the native Linux. Make it better and easier to use! Of course it has to go through our SysInternals, as that's how we package that functionality. Trust us, once there's a group of people using these features, we PROMISE that we'll continue maintaining sysInternals and that everyone who is locked in and dedicated to using these features won't be bit in the ass. It's open source! If they don't like where it goes they can just switch away or fork it. We've got our

          • Guess they shouldn't have sent Linus to reeducation camp and imposed one of the worst CoCs known to man, err, xir, hired a non-technical HR type to advise on how to enforce it, including setting up a new Committee of Public Linux Safety. Remove what kept the kernel sane, and who knows how it might eventually get twisted. Meanwhile, I'm moving to OpenBSD (which in all fairness I started because of systemd).

      • I see we're well into the "extend" phase now.

        What exactly do you think that Microsoft is extending? They are not changing anything that already exists on Linux; they are porting new utilities that will not be part of any standard Linux installation (perhaps with the exception a default install on Azure). But none of these utilities will displace the existing GNU utiltiies.

        If Microsoft ported Office to Linux, would you call that extending the operating system or just writing software that works on it? Sysinternals is no different to that.

      • Extending their own product into a competitors?

        I assume you're chasing cheap laughs with your EEE comment and aren't silly enough to think that this is a viable strategy given what they are doing, what product they are targetting or how they are currently operating. If you think it is, then you should go back to the start and re-read how EEE works.

    • Well it is "highly popular."

    • Remind me of anything close to Process Monitor or Resource Monitor in Linux. Something as easy to use and visually complete.

      Process Monitor (previously FileMon + RegMon) = inotifywait + iotop? Not even close.

      Resource Monitor = a dozen of different utilities which you can quickly get lost in and where each one of them require a separate window/terminal?

      What about deep memory overview which is provided by RamMap?

      Even "simple" Task Manager in Windows 8/10 has nothing even close in Linux - something whi

      • Re:How pointless is that (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fisted ( 2295862 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:59PM (#57595066)

        strace, ltrace, hell, dtrace. if you have the source and aren't incompetent, gdb and valgrind.
        are just the first few that come to mind.

        Oh, you're looking for a tool *exactly* like file/regmon that craps out tens of thousands of lines in a piss poor performing text widget, faster than it can actually handle the input, so by default you have to add blacklisting filters (in addition to the dozen blacklisting filters that come preinstalled) to even narrow down the data to what you may be looking for? Yeah, sorry, I don't think that's happening, nor that anybody really needs/wants it. And it only makes sense for the classical Windows problem "something is wrong but nothing tells me even remotely what may be going on so I'll have to look at all processes and the kernel at the same time", anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by higuita ( 129722 )

        so your problem is that you know windows tool and do not know the linux ones... so of course everything is hard that way!

        process monitor: duh, strace! more complex things you can use perf or eBPF
        resource monitor: are you talking of htop and atop and many other tools that merge those other tools stats?

        No idea what is RamMap, but i suspect it is a GUI for /proc/1/smaps and maybe other proc files

        Simple "task manager", htop works fine... you do not have network in there, it is included in the IO as linux ha

      • "Even "simple" Task Manager in Windows 8/10 has nothing even close in Linux - something which shows processes and CPU/Disks/RAM/GPU/NIC utilization in a very easy to understand form. "

        You should check out gkrellm (client/local app) and gkrellmd (daemon process for server monitoring) - you get all that plus CPU/GPU temps, fan speeds (CPU and Chassis), voltages and more.

    • Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default?

      Statements like this make it obvious that fanboys of any kind don't understand that there are different markets and business needs. I'm a software developer that has coded on most platforms using many different compilers and languages. I don't make money or meet objectives by troubleshooting OS issues if my specialty is application development. I buy an OS which includes a large team of people that support said product. With Linux it's different as it's an open system which is intended to be tailored to spe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )

        I don't see what the reply has to do with the quoted part, or with the whole comment for that matter.

        What's fanboyish about pointing out that there's no need to port over the highly Windows-specific ersatz-instrumentation when the target OS already has it?

        • I don't see what the reply has to do with the quoted part, or with the whole comment for that matter.

          Maybe, depends how you read the comment

          What's fanboyish about pointing out that there's no need to port over the highly Windows-specific ersatz-instrumentation when the target OS already has it?

          Why not have more than one option? We have multiple options for spreadsheet editing, document editing, CAD editing, dev IDE... What makes this different? You know a tool and if you can use it across multiple platforms it's a win for the user.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 )

      This is actually funny and sad. Don't the MS people realize that the only reason for using "sysinternals" is that their OS doesn't come with decent instrumentation by default? This toolset doesn't even come close to what's natively available in Unix or Linux.

      smh

      On the other hand, one of the selling points of Linux has always been choice; "there's more than one way to do it". The sysinternals tools are a mature set of system utilities and maybe, just maybe, at least some of the Linux ports might offer a useful addition/alternative to the existing Linux tools. Time will tell.

    • How do I watch filesystem/network events from a specific or collection of applications running in user/admin space in realtime on Linux?

      I see lots of addons for Linux as well (nothing out of the box), but nothing as simple as procmon.

  • The new code... (Score:5, Funny)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:19AM (#57593918) Homepage

    The Linux port operates on the command line, and is simply two line bash scripts and aliases.

    • with an EULA that gives MS full rights to your (Score:4, Funny)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:23AM (#57593932)

      with an EULA that gives MS full rights to your system.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Microsoft has stated that, per the USA Patriot Act, the US government could have access to the data even if the hosted company is not American and the data resides outside the USA. However, Microsoft Azure is compliant with the E.U. Data Protection Directive.

        That sounds very contradictory. I doubt it is possible to be complaint with US and EU directives at the same time.

  • then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win. Couldn't be happier today ;-)

    • nope. that was against colonial Britain.

      The U.S. way is how it will be.

      they laugh at you, they fight you, they regime change your ass and use your country in an endless war for power and profit.

  • Extend? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:37AM (#57594042)

    Now that they have Embraced Linux, now they are Extending Linux. I wonder what's next. ;)

    • Re:Extend? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stooo ( 2202012 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:58AM (#57594218) Homepage

      Next step is obviously Extinguish.
      But this time it could be MS that gets extinguished...

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        I think so actually. Nadella I think has been dead wrong on his management of the Windows properties. Opening it up has if anything slowed Windows development down in all the places that are important.

        Market share-wise its still king but that could change pretty fast in a progressively more web / network driven experience on the desktop, and the ability to move .NET / MSSQL server over to Linux pretty painless on the server end.

        Mind share-wise do you know anyone who is talking about Windows technologies a

    • Now that they have Embraced Linux, now they are Extending Linux. I wonder what's next. ;)

      Silly quotes by people who don't understand strategies or how they apply?

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:37AM (#57594044)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Windows will become a Linux desktop (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I have no doubt Windows will become just another Linux desktop eventually. Why bother paying Microsoft people to develop Windows OS when you can develop a hybrid Linux OS that run Windows apps. Obviously Microsoft is focused on Azure, the cloud, and enterprise services. That's where the real money is, not is useless consumer Windows products. Office 365 runs on anything, so its pretty clear Microsoft is not interested in a closed ecosystem anymore.

    • I can see this happening. The value of Windows kernel is pretty much gone, all it is is another expense on Microsofts budgets, so they could just shed the whole thing. They would mainly be concerned with porting all of their .NET stuff over to Linux as a migration pathway, which is already happening. I can could see them dropping the Windows kernel and replacing it with Linux kernel, basically Windows becoming a Linux distribution, maybe even dropping their C++ compiler and their C-land toolchain as well. I

  • BSOD (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, 2018 @11:42AM (#57594080)

    Hi hope they port the BSOD screensaver from the sysinternals kit as well.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • systemd doesn't have APIs for Python to do this already?

    • Part of it depends on which GUI library you expect the Python program to use to elicit commands from the user and present results to the user. Out of the box, Python ships with only Tkinter, which can't even handle Unicode code points outside the basic multilingual plane. (See for example bug 30019 [python.org] and the other bugs that its comment by Terry J. Reedy cites.) I imagine a lot of users would prefer something made with wxWidgets, GTK, or Qt.

  • I wonder if the Linux version will show Ballmer's brick wall, just like the Windows version does?

  • I wish they'd go the other way and port fuser to Windows! I am so tired of Windows telling me I cannot unplug my USB drives because something is using them. But finding that something is almost impossible since process explorer either doesn't see it or just returns svchost. There's about 30 svchost processes running and no one knows what they're being used for.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      > I am so tired of Windows telling me I cannot unplug my USB drives because something is using them. But finding that something is almost impossible since process explorer either doesn't see it or just returns svchost

      --More than likely, it is a virus scanner that is holding the drive hostage. One way around this is to get a USB drive that has a hardware-level write-lock switch such as Kanguru provides. Yanking the drive when it is doing a read operation shouldn't hurt it (CHKDSK if necessary), but ever

  • Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:27PM (#57594410) Journal

    Wouldn't it be easier to make a nice gtk front end for strace or something?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

    From Eric Raymond, speaking of open source, and quoting Gandhi.

  • Why this is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, 2018 @12:48PM (#57594572)

    I understand there is a lot of skepticism about this, but I think this is great for the Linux community. While long-time Linux users will never use these tools, it makes the transition cost for the top-tier Windows users a lot smaller.

    Most of the stereotypical Windows sysadmins have no idea what these tools are. Their standard troubleshooting involves rebooting, rebuilding, trying some magic registry key that once fixed another problem. Those users will stay in their comfort zone.

    The Windows users that understand how an operating system works and truly understand how to use various tools to analyze a problem and troubleshoot it will be able to make the transition. Sure they will use the tools they are familiar with first, but these are the personality types that will adapt. They will not be the proponents to move more Linux into legacy enterprise environments. Many will become valuable contributors to the community.

  • WinInternals (old name for Sysinternals) had a FileMon for Linux.
    I still have my copy.

  • It's a trap!

  • MS bought SysInternals in july of 07... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    you know when MS first "bought" sysinternals a long time ago ... it created the dilema for open source / closed source. Why? Well that's easy. Sysinternal's was already linux based and free!

    so MS now wants to release sysinternals ...

    would anyone like a complete copy of sysinternals ... i still have a few thumb drives with the open source linux software and the new MS owned version. Yes I was there back then...

    ps
    get off my lawn!

    i think i'll visit a torrent site and upload ...

  • Umm, Linux must need this because there's a complete dearth of tools for performing diagnostics on Linux and *NIX platforms.

    It's heartbreaking how Linux SAs just don't have any choices of tools. Poor things.....they will welcome this new gift from our Corporate Masters! ;)

  • cmd.exe (Score:3)

    by trb ( 8509 ) on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:48PM (#57596870)

    Oh gee, while they're in the neighborhood, I hope they port CMD.EXE to Linux. Sometimes a hacker just gotta get his DOS on.

  • Sorry but not being a Windows guy I have to ask:
    What does sysinternals bring to the party that we can't already achieve with existing Linux-based tools?

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