On Friday September 15th CE 6.0 was officially released to manufacturing - there are three main updates with the new release.

  1. Operating System architecture.
    1. CE 6.0 now supports upto 32k processes with 2GB virtual memory per process (CE 5.0 supported a maximum of 32 processes with 32MB Virtual Memory per process)
    2. Operating system processes moved to kernel space (GWES, Device driver manager, file system manager are all in kernel space - improves performance)
    3. New Kernel mode and user mode driver model (CE 5.0 only supported user mode drivers) - kernel mode drivers for performance, user mode drivers for stability - plus you can now have multiple instances of the user mode driver manager (hey, you have upto 32k processes!)
    4. Strict partitioning of user mode and kernel mode (no SetKMode!)
  2. Tools.
    1. The CE 6.0 development tools are integrated with Visual Studio 2005 - this gives you one tool to configure, build, download, debug, and test the operating system and the same tool to write your native (Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL, STL) or managed (C#/VB) applications.
  3. Technologies
    1. This item intentionally left blank (ok, so it's not blank, but you get the idea) - more information on supported operating system technologies will be made available at launch.

Next step, launch... - When? - keep an eye on the blog for more information...

- Mike