OpenGATE | News: From NT4 to Nano Server 2019

20 Sep 2020

Sometimes a new technology resembles an old one, and sometimes an old technology opens the GATEs to the future.

Optimizing the GATE framework for the reduced APIs of Windows Nano Server and Server 2019 running in a Docker environment had an interesting side effect:
Making APIs optional to work only when they are present did also increase the range of supported ancient operating systems back to Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.

When a GATE executable is started in a limited environment like Nano Server or also NT 4, it uses only the present APIs and implements a bunch of fallbacks to provide a minimum featureset to the user.

Running the same executable in a full desktop or enterprise server environment unlocks additional functions and optimizations to increase performance and accessibility.

graph TD; A[Any GATE based App] -- Static linking --> C(GATE Core Libs); C --> P1[[Win32 Accessor]]; C --> P2[[POSIX Accessor]]; P1-- Direct linking ---NT4 P1-- LoadLibrary ---NT10 P1-- LoadLibrary ---RT P2-- Direct linking ---POSIX P2-- dlopen ---LINUX P2-- dlopen ---BSD subgraph W[Win32] NT4(NT4 / NanoServer
Subset) NT10(Win2K - Win10
+ Server Extensions) RT(WinRT
UWP) end; subgraph U[Unix] POSIX(POSIX
Standard) LINUX(Linux
Extensions) BSD(BSD
Extensions) end

gatecli is therefore the first pocket knife tool that runs from Windows NT 4 up to Windows Server 2019 and that builds a bridge between the past and the future.