Microsoft already has an idea how the Windows operating system may evolve after Windows 8. A patent filing entitled “Fast Machine Booting Through Streaming Storage” describes a chain of storage devices with different priorities that would boot the operating system through remote storage.
There is little doubt that we are moving toward a cloud computing future that is largely comprised of software services instead of locally installed and available software. Patents ranging from search engines, media (entertainment) services, the advance of technologies such as HTML5 and WebGL, commerce systems, as well as faster and more widely available broadband services representing a colossal puzzle that eventually may be assembled and evolve the way we are perceiving computers today – devices that often hold our business/private digital life in one local place. In the future, thin clients may hold only the bare minimum that is necessary to react to the push of the power button and establish a wireless broadband connection.
A patent recently filed by Microsoft (#20110197052) now hints that Microsoft may be thinking of either complementing a future Windows on “personal computers, server computers, hand-held or laptop devices, tablet devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based systems, set top boxes, programmable consumer electronics, network PCs, minicomputers, mainframe computers, distributed computing environments” with an operating system that is streaming data to boot a device via a networked environment via local area or wide area networks.
Microsoft’s idea is based on a virtualization of storage systems that is built using a chain of different layers of near (local) storage such as flash memory or hard drives as well as far (remote) storage. The basic thought is that data is required to boot a device will be pulled from far storage and streamed to boot up a computer. Data that may be required in the future could be kept in a cache in volatile memory such as RAM. All storage devices together form a virtualized environment that is managed by a hypervisor. Each component represents a specific region of the entire storage system, while the local computer would consider a remote storage device to be “locally” available. The streaming OS has the authority to prioritize those storage devices while the initial range of data such as “0-16 megabytes may be stored on a local disk, while [the] range 16-32 megabytes may be stored in a remote file on a remote disk, and so on,” the patent application states.
According to Microsoft, the “technology facilitates fast boot because the virtual disk is available for use immediately, rather than needing to download an entire operating system image before booting from that downloaded image.” Such an OS environment would only load “a relatively small amount of data [that] is needed from the boot disk, which is available from the far data and/or the near data.” Microsoft envisions such a service to be only be available as long as data in fact needs to be copied to boot a computer or the absolutely necessary components at any given time: “In a computing environment, a system comprising, a virtual storage device for a machine that is coupled to a near backing store, and coupled to far backing store, at least until far data of the far backing store is not needed by the machine, the machine including access logic that services a read operation from near data of the near backing store when data corresponding to the read operation is available in the near backing store, or otherwise services the read from the far data.”
So, will a future Windows be booting from the Internet? Quite possibly, especially since this patent application is not just targeted at enterprise environments, but virtually every type of computing device including mobile phones, set-top boxes and personal computers. Is it just me or could Microsoft be working on a much more integrated operating system that is driven by the cloud?
