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Microsoft working on porting Sysinternals to Linux

Microsoft engineers have already ported the ProcDump utility and are currently working on porting ProcMon as well. More tools to follow.
Written by Catalin Cimpanu, Contributor

A Microsoft exec has confirmed yesterday on Twitter that the company's engineers are working on porting the highly popular Sysinternals software package to Linux.

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The revelation was made after another Microsoft employee announced hours before that the company had already ported the ProcDump application --that's part of the bigger Sysinternals collection-- to Linux.

Mario Hewardt, Principal Program Manager for Azure Diagnostics at Microsoft, later confirmed that Microsoft was also working on porting another Sysinternals utility named ProcMon to Linux as well.

According to Hewardt, these ports are part of the company's larger plan to make the Sysinternals package available for Linux users in the coming future.

For readers who are not aware what Sysinternals is, this is a collection of free software utilities that were developed back in 1996 to help with Windows debugging. Microsoft acquired Wininternals, the company behind the tools, in 2006, but continued to develop the tools, which it has been making available on its TechNet portal ever since.

The Sysinternals collection currently includes tens of tools that can be used debugging CPU and memory performance, analyzing local processes, formatting hard drives, log analysis, network debugging, verifying file integrity, and many other more.

Currently, Sysinternals is without a doubt at the top of any system administrator's list of must-have tools. Besides sysadmins, the tools are also extremely popular with security researchers, who also use them to hunt malware.

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Microsoft's decision to port this highly popular debugging utility to Linux comes after two months ago, in September, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, revealed that "sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux."

With Linux's growing adoption as the preferred OS for running Azure VMs, it's only natural that Azure engineers are now looking into porting their favorite debugging utilities to Linux, for both themselves but also for the company's customers.

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