Windows 7 Kernel version remains unchanged – still 7.0

A lot of confusion was generated today as several news sites reported about a spotting of an MSDN page indicating that the Windows 7 kernel version was 7.0 and not 6.1. An interview conducted by Neowin in October 2008 with Mike Nash also caused some misinterpretation:

So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 – which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties. There’s been some fodder about whether using 6.1 in the code is an indicator of the relevance of Windows 7. It is not.

To clarify on the facts, the kernel version of Windows will always be synonymous with that particular version of Windows. The kernel version of Windows 7 has always been 7.0, but we’ve seen with Vista that kernel version numbers can cause problems with application compatibility. For this reason, Windows 7 indicates that the kernel version is 6.1 for compatibility purposes.

After a user lashed onto Microsoft for calling the OS Windows 7 for marketing purposes instead of 6.1, Brandon Live on Neowin, who is part of the Windows 7 development team gave this response:

We named it Windows 7 from the beginning, it wasn’t even marketing that originally chose that brand, it was our internal “code name.” The builds were versioned at 7.0. It broke compatibility for too many apps/drivers, so we changed the versioning APIs to report 6.1 to reflect the level of compatibility that should be expected by pre-existing software.

I thought we’d been over this. Windows 7 is Windows 7.0. There are far more important things than driver architecture that change (and hell, there are driver architecture changes in Win7).

So no, there is no “Windows 6.1 kernel” and never was. There’s just the Windows 7 kernel.

Hopefully this post has helped eliminate some of the confusion out there surrounding kernel version numbers.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Kernel Feature Improves Security – Safe Unlinking
2. Is Windows 7 Starter really just Windows 7 Trial Version?
3. Understanding how Windows 7 Build numbers work