Environment subsystem
Components of Windows NT providing compatibility with applications
In the Windows NT architecture, environment subsystems (sometimes referred to as personalities) are user space components of the operating system that provide compatibility with an application binary interface. They allow the operating system to run software developed for the platform in question. For example, Windows NT 4.0 has three environment subsystems: Win32 (Windows API), OS/2, and POSIX, the latter of which corresponding a subset of the most common functions in the application programming interfaces of Unix-like systems. The latter resides primarily in the dynamic-link library posix.dll. The environment subsystems are one part of the strategy Microsoft developed for making the Windows NT family of operating systems a hub for multi-platform computing in addition to other elements of the architecture of Windows NT like the hardware abstraction layer.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Environment subsystem”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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- Windows 2000 architecture.svg by The original uploader was Grm wnr at English Wikipedia. Later versions were uploaded by Xyzzy n at en.wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0
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