covering the week's top tech stories with a slight linux bias microsoft has submitted a series of patches to the linux kernel with its aim being to create a complete virtualization stack with linux and microsoft hypervisor the patches are designated rfc requests for comments and are a minimal implementation presented for discussion the key change is that with the patched kernel linux will run as the hyper-v root partition in the hyper-v architecture the root partition has direct access to hardware and creates child partitions for the virtual machines it hosts microsoft principle software engineer wei liu says just think of it like zen's dom0 hyper-v's architecture is more similar to zen than it is to kvm or to esxi and leo acknowledged that they in fact draw inspiration from the zen code in linux until now the hyper-v root partition had to run windows microsoft has also ported intel's open source cloud hypervisor a virtual machine monitor that normally runs on kvm which is built into the linux kernel with these changes microsoft likely has its azure cloud infrastructure in mind azure runs more linux than windows as acknowledged back in july 2019 by microsoft engineer sasha levin who said the linux usage on our cloud has surpassed windows linux already runs well on hyper-v with a windows root partition but making this a complete linux stack may improve performance microsoft is also working hard to improve linux support in windows 10 with sls or sorry wsl2 and they even ship a linux kernel with windows gui support has been promised wsl-2 also uses hyper-v and windows 10 is on a path to becoming a hybrid windows linux system though as of now this is mainly of interest to developers microsoft's ignite virtual conference is taking place next week and we can expect the company to say more about his linux plans then you