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Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

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Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#31

Post by qwerty456127 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #7
qwerty456127 wrote: post #2

> Its primary goal is to provide environment for programs thatsurvive OS reboot. Such an environment greatly simplifies software development Simplifies? I can't even imagine such a program. To me a program is something that starts and ends and can also re-start with a fresh state in case something goes wrong.

What about some middle ground? I’d like my IDE to remain constant between reboots, my browser to some degree is already (if it crashes, it reopens all current tabs on start, which is effectively the same). I would have thought some clever hacks on an existing kernel would be reliable enough rather than an entirely new OS just for one feature, though.

Why do we need this in a kernel? Why not just serialize the essentials of the apps states and re-load it after reboot/sign-in?

I'd prefer the desktop environment to remember which apps were running including which documents were opened in them and their windows positions and just re-launch everything at start-up. Given how fast does everything cold-boot today thanks to modern SSDs, I wouldn't even use standby/hibernate if this worked this way.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#32

Post by sebastianconcpt »

kstenerud wrote: post #8

This kind of system will suffer from the ratchet problem. A single bug that negatively impacts state is no longer fixable by rebooting. Instead, you have to format/reinstall. Unintended state becomes permanent, and upgrade paths constrained to the point where you must do intentional damage. I'd also be leery of fragmentation. The project is falling into the "simplification trap", where all it's doing is moving inhere…

Well said, first thing I've though when I saw this project was: sounds like cache-invalidation hell.

Now a second and genuine follow up and wildly generalized question:

What if, given that information isn't lost (no-hiding theorem), death in the biological platforms is a reset for consciousness to continue its evolution after a renewal of any state pollution?

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#33

Post by orbifold »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #32
kstenerud wrote: post #8

This kind of system will suffer from the ratchet problem. A single bug that negatively impacts state is no longer fixable by rebooting. Instead, you have to format/reinstall. Unintended state becomes permanent, and upgrade paths constrained to the point where you must do intentional damage. I'd also be leery of fragmentation. The project is falling into the "simplification trap", where all it's doing is moving inhere…

Well said, first thing I've though when I saw this project was: sounds like cache-invalidation hell. Now a second and genuine follow up and wildly generalized question: What if, given that information isn't lost (no-hiding theorem), death in the biological platforms is a reset for consciousness to continue its evolution after a renewal of any state pollution?

These conservation laws apply to open systems (which biological platforms are). All ready at the cell level the primary concern is how to "efficiently" do energy cascades which sometimes have unintended (irreversible) side-effects. So cells get "garbage collected", there are other more system level irreversible changes, some intended (memory) and unintended, which I guess are indeed ultimately unsalvageable, which is why reproduction is a thing (pristine copy of genome in new cell).

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#34

Post by jonathanstrange »

kstenerud wrote: post #13
checker659 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapshotting is another solution.

But now since there's no boundary between persistent and ephemeral state, reverting to a snapshot will damage all of your other processes and lose data in unpredictable ways due to the halting problem. The cure could end up worse than the disease.

The distinction between persistent and ephemeral state may be too coarse-grained. In many applications like preference systems and object persistence more fine-grained distinctions are needed. As a typical example, miscellaneous data like window positions, sizes, and settings can and should be reset under certain conditions in desktop applications, but they still need to be persistent. There is a need for systems of default values & conditions that regulate when resets from corrupted states are allowed and when resets are executed for certain types of data (but not for others).

I've never seen a framework or OS-support such fine-grained persistence and failure management. It's strange because almost every application needs something like this, and if it's just to reset a faulty preferences file. I've always thought that these kind of features should be provided by the OS, together with indexing and better guarantees for file integrity (e.g. ACID-compliant atomic file operations).

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#35

Post by fsflover »

joshuajomiller wrote: post #9
kstenerud wrote: post #8

This kind of system will suffer from the ratchet problem. A single bug that negatively impacts state is no longer fixable by rebooting. Instead, you have to format/reinstall. Unintended state becomes permanent, and upgrade paths constrained to the point where you must do intentional damage. I'd also be leery of fragmentation. The project is falling into the "simplification trap", where all it's doing is moving inhere…

Couldn't there be a middle ground that allows you to restart/reset a single application?

Sounds like Qubes OS with disposable VMs.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#36

Post by pjmlp »

I like the ideas in Phantom, even considering the negative comments, it is refreshing to see people having a go at OS design that isn't just blindly making yet another UNIX clone, because apparently we can't get enough of them.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#37

Post by jl6 »

I get similar benefits from running an application in a VM. If I don’t want to shut down the application, I just save the running state of the VM. But if I need to recover from a crash or other state error, I can still reboot the VM.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#38

Post by PretzelPirate »

joshuajomiller wrote: post #9
kstenerud wrote: post #8

This kind of system will suffer from the ratchet problem. A single bug that negatively impacts state is no longer fixable by rebooting. Instead, you have to format/reinstall. Unintended state becomes permanent, and upgrade paths constrained to the point where you must do intentional damage. I'd also be leery of fragmentation. The project is falling into the "simplification trap", where all it's doing is moving inhere…

Couldn't there be a middle ground that allows you to restart/reset a single application?

The FAQ calls this out as a way to recover from a bad state. It seems to already be implemented in the OS.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#39

Post by ilaksh »

New operating systems are really needed for virtual and augmented reality. Especially with higher resolution, more comfortable devices that people use for work. I think the 3d file system representation will finally become normal.

It will be an exciting time for user interface development.

Possibly we could see networked collaboration/"multiplayer" at the OS level.

Re: Phantom OS: Persistent Operating System

#40

Post by ajuc »

kstenerud wrote: post #8

This kind of system will suffer from the ratchet problem. A single bug that negatively impacts state is no longer fixable by rebooting. Instead, you have to format/reinstall. Unintended state becomes permanent, and upgrade paths constrained to the point where you must do intentional damage. I'd also be leery of fragmentation. The project is falling into the "simplification trap", where all it's doing is moving inhere…

You could base such system on software transactional memory and persistent data structures (like in Clojure) and in case of a bug just revert the state to any particular point in time by changing one pointer.

Your app crashed? No problem - Rewind 5 minutes earlier and don't do the thing that crashed it.

There's whole unexplored universe of possibilities when we do away with traditional OS design. I'm especially interested in how it would work with Intel Optane.

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