The support for Hadoop on Windows was proposed in HADOOP-8079<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8079> almost a year ago. The goal was to make Hadoop natively integrated, full-featured, and performance and scalability tuned on Windows Server or Windows Azure. We are happy to announce that a lot of progress has been made in this regard.
Initial work started in a feature branch, branch-1-win, based on branch-1. The details related to the work done in the branch can be seen in CHANGES.txt<http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/hadoop/common/branches/branch-1-win/CHANGES.branch-1-win.txt?view=markup>. This work has been ported to a branch, branch-trunk-win, based on trunk. Merge patch for this is available on HADOOP-8562<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8562> . Highlights of the work done so far: 1. Necessary changes in Hadoop to run natively on Windows. These changes handle differences in platforms related to path names, process/task management etc. 2. Addition of winutils tools for managing file permissions and ownership, user group mapping, hardlinks, symbolic links, chmod, disk utilization, and process/task management. 3. Added cmd scripts equivalent to existing shell scripts hadoop-daemon.sh, start and stop scripts. 4. Addition of block placement policy implemnation to support cloud enviroment, more specifically Azure. We are very close to wrapping up the work in branch-trunk-win and getting ready for a merge. Currently the merge patch is passing close to 100% of unit tests on Linux. Soon I will call for a vote to merge this branch into trunk. Next steps: 1. Call for vote to merge branch-trunk-win to trunk, when the work completes and precommit build is clean. 2. Start a discussion on adding Jenkins precommit builds on windows and how to integrate that with the existing commit process. Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Suresh