Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

I was one of those weird users who used the 64-bit version of Windows XP, with what I'm pretty sure was an Athlon 64 X2, both the first 64-bit chip and first dual-core one that I had.

XP64 shared a lot with Windows Server 2003. Perhaps the best Windows ever released.

Did 2003 have symlinks?

7 and 2008R2 were pretty good too. All downhill from there..

It had junction points and hard links but symbolic links were added in Vista/Server 2008.

We tried Windows 2000 Professional for the DEC Alpha for a GIS system in the late 90s. Suddenly made the $5000 PCs that could run it seem cheap.

Unfortunately, NT for Alpha only ran in a 32-bit address space.

"The 64-bit versions of Windows NT were originally intended to run on Itanium and DEC Alpha; the latter was used internally at Microsoft during early development of 64-bit Windows. This continued for some time after Microsoft publicly announced that it was cancelling plans to ship 64-bit Windows for Alpha. Because of this, Alpha versions of Windows NT are 32-bit only."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#64-bit_platforms

This seems odd, as there was a POSIX layer in Windows from the beginning, and I can't see how it could do without symbolic links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

No idea if the POSIX subsystem used NTFS or some other filesystem but if it was NTFS it probably just used the same reparse data buffer. It's just that Windows only added a symlink buffer structure in Vista/2008. You can manually use the same data buffer in older Windows versions it just won't know what to do with them just like all the other reparse data structures.

So the "reparse data buffer" would be able to implement symlink() as a POSIX system call?

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695299/functions/sy...

Alpha support was removed in one of the later NT5 betas right? Makes sense that it would've been late 90s then, before it was renamed Windows 2000 for release.

The subsystem in question would be the one to handle the logic for the syscall. So the POSIX subsystem would use the reparse data buffer as needed. It's just that the Win32 subsystem added its own symlink one in Vista/2008.

This is all a guess, the POSIX subsystems were a bit before my time and I've never actually used them. I just know how symlinks work on Windows/NTFS and when they were added.

Yeah I remember windows xp 64b, running on my Pentium D (first Intel dual cores, IIRC).

Me too! It was funny how little love it got given how well it worked.

The only issues I came across were artificial blocks. Some programs would check the OS version and give an error just because. Even the MSN Messenger (also by Microsoft) refused to install by default; I had to patch the msi somehow to install it anyway. And then it ran without issues, once installed.

Years ago, I had a CD marked "Windows 2000 for Alpha RC1", which suggests that it was cancelled quite late in the release cycle.

It was canceled essentially overnight by Compaq higher-ups, teams at Microsoft and Compaq learnt when they came to office. It was present on last release candidate before RTM, because it was essentially the only 64bit platform to actually fixup 32bit issues that prevented 64bit address space in earlier NT releases.