Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a package which provides a Unix compliant environment on Microsoft Windows computers. It provides both a subsystem, named Interix and a set of tools. Microsoft does not intend to produce any further versions of the product and plans to discontinue support for it [1] because it is being integrated as part of the regular OS distribution[2].
Interix is not an emulation of a Unix kernel. It is an implementation of an environment subsystem running within the Windows kernel. This significantly improves performance, stability and security compared with the emulation used by Cygwin.
SFU contains:
- GCC 3.3 compiler, includes and libraries
- A cc-like wrapper for Microsoft Visual Studio command-line C/C++ compiler
- GDB and Insight debuggers
- NFS server and client
- a pcnfsd daemon
- X Windows tools and libraries
- Tools for making NFS mountpoints appear as Windows shares, and vice-versa (gateway services)
- some Windows/Unix authentication information synchronization tools
Although X Windows client libraries and applications are provided, SFU does not contain a native X server. A number of third party X servers can be used including WRQ's Reflection X or Hummingbird's Exceed. In addition, StarNet provides a free Win32 X Server designed specifically for local X applications on Windows. Several free software X11 Server implementations are available from X/Cygwin, Xming and X-Deep/32.
Released versions
Current release is version 3.5 on January, 2004. Next scheduled release is version 5.2 on December, 2005 (for Windows 2003 Server Release 2, aka W2K3/R2, only). Previous version 3.0 released 2002.