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Inferno Operating System

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Re: Inferno Operating System

#61
I remember reading about this in a Danish PC mag ‘PC Pro’ (or ‘Alt om Net’) in ca 1998. From memory there was also a framework called ‘Hades’ as per the mythological river. Or am I wrong here?

Re: Inferno Operating System

#62
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux containers feel like weak imitations of jails and zones found in FreeBSD and Solaris/illumos, for that matter.

Yeah zones especially, I agree.

Why not Jails? It was pretty much the first to provide this in Unix land. I guess the advantage of Docker / containers was / is the nice TUI for developers as well as Hub. We never had a ‘jailshub’ in FreeBSD.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#63
post #43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux containers feel like a very weak imitation of what they could be under an environment like Plan9 imo. Linux lacks a lot of core abstraction properties that would make containers elegant to implement under something like the Plan9 model, at least. Cool project inspired partially by Linux containers: https://doc.9gridchan.org/guides/spawngrid

Linux containers feel like weak imitations of jails and zones found in FreeBSD and Solaris/illumos, for that matter.

Except the user interface for them on FreeBSD compared to i.e. docker is atrocious.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#64
post #38

This OS doesn't require an MMU or protected memory. I wonder if a processor architecture that lacks those features could yield much higher performance due to less complexity, reduced memory latency or less cache miss penalty. Will it be enough to mitigate the perormance penalty of runing code in the Dis VM?

You'd have to compensate for the lack of memory protection by running all unprivileged code in a VM, which would very likely introduce its own class of complexities and performance penalties.

Inferno already runs all unprivileged code in a VM. When I installed it on a Raspberry Pi for example could disable or enable its MMU, it didn't make a difference at all.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#65

Back when I was in university we had a small course on Limbo/Inferno because of a connection my university (RIT) had to bell labs. I took the course in... 1998? and wrote a version of Tetris for limbo. The code was awful, but did find a bug in the Tk implementation. This lead me to my proudest/most embarrassing programming moment - apparently, my code ended up in front of Dennis Ritchie, who thought the code was terr…

I find it impressive you still have code you wrote for a university class in '98!

I still have code I wrote for the C64 in 1988 lol.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CRIU should allow you to migrate a running process from one system to another, particularly in combination with a container (Docker or LXC/D).

Doesn't this work on about nothing in practice? Like nothing that has an open file, no gui apps etc.

Fairly sure files, network connections, ... are not a problem, unless I'm confusing it with a different migration solution. GUI apps probably only work if access through some network connection.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#67
post #38

This OS doesn't require an MMU or protected memory. I wonder if a processor architecture that lacks those features could yield much higher performance due to less complexity, reduced memory latency or less cache miss penalty. Will it be enough to mitigate the perormance penalty of runing code in the Dis VM?

You could do that (see Singularity OS [0] and Midori [1]), but recently it was discovered that it wouldn't work on modern out-of-order CPUs due to Spectre [2].

[0] https://research.cs.wisc.edu/areas/os/Seminar/schedules/pape... [1] http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178

Re: Inferno Operating System

#68
post #2

Namespaces: a program's view of the network is a single, coherent namespace that appears as a hierarchical file system but may represent physically separated (locally or remotely) resources Standard communication protocol: a standard protocol, called Styx, is used to access all resources, both local and remote This looks similar to Qubes Air roadmap: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/22/qubes-air/

Except that you cannot run a Qubes CPU server without a giant overhead.

As a happy Qubes user, the overhead in CPU is barely noticeable for Xen virtualization. One needs a lot of RAM though.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#69

Back when I was in university we had a small course on Limbo/Inferno because of a connection my university (RIT) had to bell labs. I took the course in... 1998? and wrote a version of Tetris for limbo. The code was awful, but did find a bug in the Tk implementation. This lead me to my proudest/most embarrassing programming moment - apparently, my code ended up in front of Dennis Ritchie, who thought the code was terr…

I find it impressive you still have code you wrote for a university class in '98!

My dad has a box of punchcards for code he wrote in his university class, well before ‘98. I think all of my own 90s era code was on floppy disks that may or may not still be readable.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#70
post #51
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux containers feel like a very weak imitation of what they could be under an environment like Plan9 imo. Linux lacks a lot of core abstraction properties that would make containers elegant to implement under something like the Plan9 model, at least. Cool project inspired partially by Linux containers: https://doc.9gridchan.org/guides/spawngrid

> Linux lacks a lot of core abstraction properties No, it's worse than that: It has too many of them, leading to a mess of special cases that you have to deal with. What happens when you have a socket in your file system, and you export it over NFS? Lacking abstraction properties is fixable -- you can add them. But removing them, especially if they're widely used, is incredibly hard.

To be fair that is a general UNIX issue.
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