Thursday, January 04, 2007

* Microsoft Vista : Services Enhancements


Microsoft has done some significant enhancements in services management.

* Delayed Start - Auto start services have a significant performance impact on boot time due to lot of I/O requests and contention over global resources. A new startup option called 'Delayed Start' has been introduced which will cause the service to start only after computer has booted completely.

* Session 0 Isolation - Session 0 has been reserved exclusively for services and applications that are not associated with user interactive session. It will not support user interfaces and so processes running in this session will not have access to graphics hardware.

* Failure Detection & Recovery - In Vista, service doesn't need to necessarily crash for failure action to get triggered. Services can notify SCM to initiate failure action even if they encounter some non-fatal but serious exception.

* Preshutdown Notifications - Vista introduces a concept of Preshutdown notifications where services can register with SCM to get preshutdown notifications before final shutdown notification. This gives services more time to shutdown gracefully.

* Running with Least Privilege - Services can now be configured to run using a user defined account with only the required privileges. This helps in stopping virus attacks which use services running under Local System account which has maximum privileges. It also isolates service from corrupting other processes.

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