History of Microsoft Services For Unix

The initial version of SFU was introduced in 1999 and brought together several different products into a loosely coupled package. Version 2.0 of SFU extended and substantially improved the Network File System (NFS) support, adding Gateway for NFS and revamping the authentication and integration with Windows, while providing a more fully integrated product. In version 3.0 (May, 2002) Microsoft replaced the utility and shell emulation layer based on MKS Untilities with Interix technology.

Interix contains a full application execution subsystem that lets you compile and natively run UNIX programs and scripts on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, or Windows 2000. Running as a native subsystem on Windows, provides for a significant improvement in throughput and stability over an emulation layer. Version 3.5 of SFU supports threaded applications and has improved support for internationalization. NFS support has been extended as well to improve authentication in native Windows Server 2003 Active Directory environments.

In version 3.5 Microsoft substantially improved the performance of SFU. Improvement vary from 30% improvements in fork and exec performance, 75% in pipe bandwidth, 100% in file I/O, and more than 150% in fstat latency. File I/O is now within 10% of the Win32 subsystem. Additional improvements in multiprocessor scalability have also been realized, resulting in a roughly 50% improvement in Apache performance with Interix on an 8-way system. There have been substantial performance improvements in the Server for NFS and Server for NIS components of SFU as well.

SFU 3.5 has been explicitly tested for interoperability with Solaris 7 and 8, HP-UX 11i, AIX 5L 5.2, and Red Hat Linux 8.0. SFU 3.5 runs on Windows 2000 (Professional and Server versions), Windows XP Professional, and all Windows Server 2003 versions.

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Last modified: February 28, 2008