I work at MSFT and while not involved with kernel stuff directly I interact with them from time to time. The sentiment among kernel people is they'd put the NT kernel up against Linux in efficiency any day of the week.
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.