Will 'Drawbridge' Ever Lower for the Market?
Microsoft Research has developed hundreds (er, thousands) of projects. Some have turned into actual projects, but when I recently said that Kinect was one of them, I was mistaken. An observant and well-informed Redmond Report reader pointed out my error.
Research is now developing a chunk of operating system software aimed at virtualizing apps through the old concept of sandboxing, code-named "Drawbridge."
Microsoft already has work in the direction. Windows 8, for instance, will include Hyper-V. This isn't application sandboxing or virtualization. But since you can run virtual machines each with their own OS, you can run apps in these VMs, albeit with all the overhead.
I think I get why it is called Drawbridge. Through a so-called Library OS, each apps gets access to a chunk of the OS, both of which access the same memory space. Drawbridge is not an OS -- it's an add-on and a test version that is already running on top of Win 7 in the labs.
Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for making this news public.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/09/2011 at 1:18 PM