MENU

Notes

The history is getting filled in as I can remember it and find verifying information. If you have additional information please let me know -- I'm looking for information from everyone.

pre-OpenNT

Softway Systems is formed in 1995 to begin development of OpenNT. Softway is successful in coming to an arrangement with Microsoft to further develop the Posix (Unix) capabilities for Microsoft's NT Operating System (OS). Other vendors had made unsuccessful pitches earlier. Softway's arrangement with Microsoft is quite far reaching because it allowed them full access to all Microsoft source code (though Microsoft was did not always meet this obligation). Principals get things rolling for development, sales & marketing. Head office is based in San Fran., California; development is in Kitchener, Ontario initially with Fort Collin, Colorado during the 2.0 development; sales offices in several locations.

OpenNT 1.0

This spring 1996 release was the first from Softway Systems with 100 utilities. The utilities were based on the 4.4BSD release. Jason Zions and Stephen Walli spent a year porting the code to run on the POSIX subsystem. There were no changes to the subsystem for this release.

OpenNT 1.1

This was the first SDK (software development kit) release. This was released in the fall of 1996. The development compiler is based on MSVC to produce Posix binaries. VSC tests start internally for future releases. OpenNT releases are for Intel X86 and Digital Alpha chips.

OpenNT 2.0

This summer 1997 release will continue to be the most significant change from any earlier release. A huge amount of Unix functionality is added with system behavior, available system API's and utilities/daemons including csh/tcsh, telnetd, inetd, loginenv, ps, truss, apache, scm, curses, Perl. An Alpha release was handed out in the Spring for free to people.

New functionality includes real terminal support, job control, BSD sockets, pseudo terminals (pty's), select(), "#!" script support, NFS integration, more signals, /proc, Win32 exec, pipes, numerous subsystem timing fixes, ioctl(), /dev, /dev/r+d, numerous other API's, X11R5 libraries & programs, defaultdomain code, fully qualified username (FQUN), serial ports, better libc & stdio.

A patch of 2.0 is released for some timing fixes.

OpenNT 2.1

Ships in December 1997. New functionality includes gcc/gdb, utmpx & wtmpx, popen(), syslog, talkd, fingerd, wall, ftpd, regpwd, script, bash available from warehouse,

Interix 2.2 (Softway)

This was the last release from Softway before Microsoft bought Interix.

Interix Firebrand

Originally due to be released by Softway in the fall of 1999. No version number was designated yet. The Firebrand code was transferred to Microsoft (fall 1999) when it bought Interix. This is the code base used for Interix 3.0.

Interix 2.2 (Microsoft)

A minor update to the Softway Interix 2.2 release to work with Windows 2000 due to an NT kernel change. This would be the only release from Microsoft for the next three years.

Interix 3.0 (SFU 3.0)

A significant release based on the Firebrand code. This release encapsulates Interix as a component of SFU (Service for Unix) version 3.0. The release was originally scheduled to happen about 6 months earlier, but Microsoft's Windows Division had orders from the top that the source code for all applications had to have a review for "security".

Interix 3.5 (SFU 3.5)

This was the last release of Interix as part of SFU (Services for Unix). Microsoft continues to support Interix and the other SFU components for many years. The reason for ending SFU is that most of the SFU components (including Interix) will henceforth be released as part of the base OS. This is the start of SFU being offered for free. Previously it cost about $99 USD's with SFU 3.0. SFU 3.5 will be available for download until 2009 with general support until 2011 and extended support until 2014 (i.e. you've paid for a bug support contract with MS).

The biggest addition is "pthreads". However, since Interix has already had real fork()/vfork() and exec() support since OpenNT days, Unix programmers should remember that threads are not the be-all and end-all for programming as it is for Windows. There are thread pitfalls (under any system) that can be avoided with small processes and IPC. This release also includes performance improvements for file I/O.

For a while during pre-release version 3.5 had the version number 4.0.

Interix 5.2 (SUA on R2)

The most recent release that is available only on Windows 2003/R2. This heralds the start of the Interix subsystem "jewels" being distributed as part of the base Windows OS.

New functionality for this release includes "mixed mode" support, a gcc that does not create binaries that write on the stack (thus avoiding the DEP/MX problem), available on 64-bit Windows OS, large filesystem support (only on 64-bit systems, *sigh*). There are a number of additional undocumented system API's.

Interix 6.0 (SUA on Vista)

One of the new additions is IPv6 for sockets now that WinSock has IPv6 support. Major update of utilities. Some work begun for C99 support (see header files).

Interix/SUA will run on x86, x64 and IA64 hardware -- 32-bit and 64-bit. For IA64 this support only starts post-6.0. Most of the utilities will have been updated for this release. This is the most significant utility update since Softway updated the utilities just before Interix went to Microsoft. Some additional API's have been added as well. Vista is up to SP1 now and the most current download of the Utilities and SDK works fine with SP1. On 64-bit systems Shared libraries and DSO's work only in the "thunking mode" (32-bit running on 64-bit).

Server 2008

Interix is being included in the Server 2008 release. Currently this is the early part of the year 2008. The version number for Interix remains at 6.0.

Beyond...

I know, just like everybody else, that MS is working on Windows 7. AFAIK a version of Interix/SUA will be included. No, I know no details at this time.