The core Windows OS is actually very cool, IMO. Pity it's closed source. Some time ago, I did some research on Windows 2000 and wrote a lot of it down on the Windows 2000 Wikipedia article. I later split it to the "Architecture of Windows 2000", which interestingly (and correctly) has been renamed to "Architecture of Windows NT" [1]
What you are referring to, however, is in user mode, in the environment subsystem. There is actually a few subsystems - the one you are talking about is the POSIX subsystem. I believe it's actually still there in the latest versions (might be wrong about that).
POSIX was not. It's call SUA and I still enable it, and on w7 run Gentoo bootstrap under it. It works well enough and I even see sshd run as a service process.
Thanks, I didn't know that SUA still uses a subsystem that's different from the Win32 subsystem. However, it's a different one (Interix) from the old POSIX subsystem, as far as I know. Or does anyone know whether it shares or inherits some code from it?
What you are referring to, however, is in user mode, in the environment subsystem. There is actually a few subsystems - the one you are talking about is the POSIX subsystem. I believe it's actually still there in the latest versions (might be wrong about that).
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT