iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 27/12/2025

WSL runs microVMs, same tech that was initially developed for running hw-virtualized containers (aka Hyper-V “Xenon” containers) on Windows. It exposes a minimal modern (“born in the cloud”) virtual motherboard, plus state mirroring between the two kernels to keep them in-sync. Really cool stuff.

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Support by listening. He currently has 3,000 monthly listeners. Make it 300,000. open.spotify.com/album/1K9kvI...

open.spotify.com

Groove City

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 02/12/2025

direct access to hardware accelerated devices such as GPUs for full performance. In Direct Virtualization, the parent orchestrator VM can ask the hypervisor to take its CPU, memory and device resources, and create child VMs with those resources to run untrusted workloads it directly controls. [2/3]

Manifold is Azure's AI infrastructure orchestrator. It uses the new Direct Virtualization feature to securely and efficiently run its workloads.

Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 02/12/2025

We've announced a new feature called "Direct Virtualization" at #MSIgnite. We want containers to be 1st-class citizens in #Microsoft #Azure, give container and application orchestrators the ability to run untrusted or confidential workloads securely with hardware virtualization, and give them [1/3]

Comparison of direct virtualization and nested virtualization. In direct virtualization, the guest does not run a nested hypervisor and can give its child VMs direct access to the hardware.

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...your code in a child VM on top of a nested hypervisor, which requires maintenance and comes with significant performance penalties. With DV, you can now run child VMs inside your VM using the Azure hypervisor, with full performance parity and device acceleration. No nested hypervisor required.

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Inside Azure Innovations with Mark Russinovich

We've announced a new feature called "Direct Virtualization" at Ignite. The only acceptable security boundary in Azure to run untrusted code is virtualization. What if you, as a customer, also want to run code in isolation? Conventional answer is to run... ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/sessio... 15:40

ignite.microsoft.com

Join Mark Russinovich, CTO and Technical Fellow of Microsoft Azure. Mark will take you on a tour of the latest innovations in Azure architecture and explain how Azure enables intelligent, modern, and ...

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 02/09/2025

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The local church demonstrates extreme selective quoting. 🎵 Imagine there is no hell or heaven ... no religion too... Worship at 10.

Church sign "Imagine all the people living in peace - John Lennon"

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 27/08/2025

There is a "Skype dial pad" feature in the Teams app (both Windows and iOS), but it is just a link to calling.web.skype.com.

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 27/08/2025

Skype the brand is dead, but Skype the product is still alive; it just merged into Teams. All accounts, contacts, chats, credits etc. are still available in Teams.

support.microsoft.com

Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams Free - Microsoft Support

Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 19/06/2025

Nice! Windows now enforces much higher USB-C feature and performance standards than what USB-IF and USB specs allow. Every USB-C port on every new (24H2) Windows PC supports displays, chargers and data. techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microso...

techcommunity.microsoft.com

Ending USB Type-C® Port Confusion: How Windows 11 WHCP Delivers Consistent Performance on Certified Devices

Confused by blank displays or missing features on your USB-C ports? Not all ports are created equal. Learn why even the newest Windows 11 PCs can fail...

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Reposted by Onur Filiz

Tom Warren @tomwarren.co.uk · 08/05/2025

Bill Gates tears into Elon Musk for being “involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.” He’s also put a 20-year deadline on giving away virtually all of his wealth www.theverge.com/news/663322/...

theverge.com

Bill Gates tears into Elon Musk for being ‘involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children’

Gates said Musk put USAID funding in the “wood chipper.”

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 08/04/2025

I left Amazon because I hated the politics and bureaucracy there, but I was still proud of the work we did. Now, this, just makes me feel sick.

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 01/03/2025

So you’ve reached the bargaining stage. I’ve been stuck in depression since January.

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Reposted by Onur Filiz

Tom Warren @tomwarren.co.uk · 20/01/2025

it looks like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is notably absent from Trump’s inauguration 🤔

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 07/01/2025

A note of gratitude as we welcome 2025. I've kept this fortune cookie slip in my home office for the past 20 years. It's from our first team lunch after joining Microsoft in late 2004. Finding peace, meaning and purpose in your work is a blessing. May 2025 bring you your own happy new adventures.

Fortune cookie with the text "You will have a happy adventure soon."

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 07/01/2025

XPS isn’t dead. It is just being rebranded as “Max”, starting with the next generation in mid-2025.

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Onur Filiz @onur.filiz.dev · 22/12/2024

I have a basic understanding of how LLMs work, so I realize calling this "intelligence" would be akin to seeing ghosts in a teacup. But from a strictly practical get-stuff-done point of view, GitHub #Copilot surprises me a few times a day by practically reading my mind. Note I only typed "#define".

Code snippet showing GitHub Copilot auto-complete the word "#define" to an entire macro, reading my mind.

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Reposted by Onur Filiz

Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Happy #QuantumDay to all who celebrate! Max Planck submitted work on blackbody radiation to the German Physical Society #OTD in 1900. His novel “quantum hypothesis” suggested that matter emits and absorbs light with frequency f only in discrete chunks of energy E=hf. 🧪 ⚛️ (1/n) Image: AIP

A black and white photo of Max Planck. His arms are crossed and he is looking at the camera. Planck has a substantial mustache and his hair is receding. He is wearing a heavy, dark suit with a high-collared white shirt and a small black bowtie.

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That's the beauty of incremental improvements. I enjoy the simplicity, the ROI, the craft, as much as those shiny big projects. We overstate impact of "new". Impact is putting in that extra effort in everyday work, making the right engineering trade-offs, wherever you can find it. 2 MiBs at a time.

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On a typical Windows client, savings amount to ~2MiB of nonpaged pool. Not much. When you install the Windows 11 24H2 update, you won't notice it. On scale, for 1.5 billion eligible Windows clients, these 20 lines save 3 PiBs (~2^51) of memory globally. And I've done it 3 times already this year.

Simply growing it would "fix the bug". But at Microsoft's scale, every line of code impacts tens, hundreds of millions of people. One-size-fits-all, doesn't. So, I wrote a heuristic that adjusts the buffer size dynamically based on the OS SKU, processor count, memory size, etc. 20 lines in an hour.

The hypervisor runs everywhere nowadays, from Xbox to Azure, ranging from hw with a few cores and MBs of memory, to giants in Azure with 100s of cores and TBs of memory. It also runs on Windows 10/11, where it's the foundation for virtualization-based security. The buffer needed to grow for Azure.

Case in point, when I restarted in the Microsoft CoreOS team last year, my 1st task was a 1-liner bugfix for the hypervisor diagnostic log circular buffer size. The buf needs to stay resident in memory and be large enough to ensure no logs are dropped while a thread flushes it to persistent storage.