Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#111

Post by nwah1 » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #32

https://www.redox-os.org/ Redox is a super interesting project. Not because it’s Rust based. But because rarely do people start from scratch to build a new OS. (eg, OpenBSD forked NetBSD, Dragonly forked FreeBSD, Ubuntu from Debian, etc) —- https://fuchsia.dev/ Would be another of interest.

Good recommendations. OSes today are more than kernels. Filesystems, init systems, shells, and the configuration conventions would all be part of it. And probably also the windowing system and desktop environment.

The most innovative concepts historically would be Plan9, BeOS, and seL4.

Plan9's approach of "everything is a file" is something that was unique.

BeOS's extensive use of journalling and metadata in the filesystem gave it big advantages.

seL4 being the most rigorous application of a micro-kernel architecture, and making use of formal verification make this one stand out.

Capability-based operating systems also offer immense benefits.

Fuchsia and Redox are clearly drawing some inspiration from these. Along with GNU Hurd, which you didn't mention.

As for shells, nushell is clearly revolutionary. Something that points to what a better world might have been.

I would also recommend looking at Lennart Poettering's vision that extends on innovations like cgroups, journalling filesystems, ostree, etc.

https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

And of course, Nix and Guix both align with this vision of reproducibility, statelessness, and transactionality... along with Fedora Silverblue.

I kinda think of this as making the filesystem work more like git. A distro is a branch. A rollback is a branch from a previous commit.

And then the build system would be completely idempotent... every compilation from any system would be byte-for-byte identical, and thus verifiable in a security sense. And every upgrade on any system could be undone.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#112

Post by yungporko » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

vilunov wrote: post #103

rujkking wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…

We haven't improved much since Win 95 in terms of desktop OS UI/UX. Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11? Local search, improved UAC and a shitload of ads.

i'd go as far as to say there have been zero improvements, substantial or minor.

i mean, thank god windows now has three distinct and clashing UI styles in different parts of the OS, i don't know how we ever managed to live with just one.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#113

Post by TehCorwiz » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #87

cedws wrote: post #75

Serenity is one of the only recent OS projects that I think has any potential. It's a very high velocity, high quality project and I think that's down to the community culture Andreas has fostered. They aren't a load of fuddy-duddies who insist on using mailing lists and IRC. Nobody wants to collaborate with a load of grumpy greybeards.

I think ladybird has unfortunately sucked most of the momentum out of the project.

I disagree. It’s driving progress in GPU support and acceleration, Image format support, standard lib stability. These all happen under the hood of the os and aren’t particularly flashy. But, the architecture of Serenity and Ladybird means that a lot of the core lib stuff is immediately available to the rest of the is and user space.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#114

Post by rujkking » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

cedws wrote: post #105

rujkking wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…

>You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? They aren't building it for "modern users", they're building it for fun. To build a usable operating system you need manpower. To get manpower you need money or you need to build a community around an interesting project that people will work on for free. Andreas has managed to do both of these things. Serenity is not just anoth…

Prove “fun” isn’t just an emotional equivocation to burn resources living in one’s nostalgia only to quickly abandon it like numerous attempts at amiga and commodore style OS clones being built for fun in the 00s

If it’s not for modern computer users and lacks a meaningful ecosystem of software and purpose its first worlders avoiding contributing to real work they externalize on others

There’s enough academic wank in the world. Better to focus on pushing computing forward for the aggregate than serve personal ego

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#115

Post by thfuran » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #6

josephg wrote: post #2

I'm increasingly tempted to try my hand at making a toy OS - or at least a kernel. There's a few things I desperately want an operating system to do: 1. Have either database-like transactions or (at a minimum) write barriers for file operations. The current filesystem semantics are terrible for databases and other applications which need to not corrupt their data after a crash. fsync() is too heavy, because you can't…

Do it. Ignore whoever says it's too complicated. You probably won't supplant Linux with your toy OS for your own research, but for a software engineer, writing a OS is the closest thing we have to the exhilarating feeling of seeing your code affect real hardware. You haven't lived until a bug of your own causes a triple-fault exception that causes a literal system shutdown. I started this career writing my own tiny O…

>but for a software engineer, writing a OS is the closest thing we have to the exhilarating feeling of seeing your code affect real hardware.

Unless you want to muck about with toy robotics or home automation.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#116

Post by hnthrowaway0328 » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #89

How does one get started on a toy OS? I don’t mean like concepts, but is there like a minimum viable OS .c file somewhere I can look at, with instructions for how to run it on “bare metal”? I assume I need a bootloader of some kind first? I’m just totally unsure where I’d even begin in a practical sense.

Checkout Linux 0.01. The kernel is just a handful of files.

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/0.01/source

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#117

Post by exe34 » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

vilunov wrote: post #103

rujkking wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…

We haven't improved much since Win 95 in terms of desktop OS UI/UX. Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11? Local search, improved UAC and a shitload of ads.

It's gone downhill. Scrollbars that only appear half the times you need them, buttons that aren't buttons, not-buttons that are in fact buttons, instead of curated menus Evince has three places you can click and hope to find the function you want in one of them, it's just a mess.

Win 95 had the basic UX down, and Tiger made it look very pretty, but it didn't need any more fixing.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#118

Post by convolvatron » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #34

shiroiuma wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean that some little SQLite DB for your web browser's storage and settings needs its own partition; that's obviously going too far. I mean for really huge databases, where an entire server is dedicated to running that DB and it has high performance needs.

Fair enough. But I am including all of those little databases. I agree with you - you could hack around this for a big database by putting it on a dedicated partition (even though you shouldn't need to). But I'm also thinking about applications with little databases that need to live inside the filesystem. They shouldn't need to embed sqlite in order to survive a crash. A different syscall API would allow you to writ…

last time I looked at this, and it was a long time ago, it was around 10% and workload dependent.

if you make direct and locking more robust, and allowed an application to turn off the kernel cache, you would only really need to interact with the filesystem after open in order to change your extents.

+1. this is clearly a place where we can have nice things and performance

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#119

Post by andoando » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

beardedetim wrote: post #49

openquery wrote: post #44

> But at least in my case, whenever I tell people about some idea, I kind of tend to lose interest in the idea. So I just went to work on it instead. I think that's great advice.

I read somewhere long ago that there's some chemical released when you talk about your plans, similar to the chemical that gets released when you complete your plan. So when you talk about your ideas, you feel like you've already accomplished them. Ever since I heard this, I've been protective of what I talk about and it seems to have helped me ship more things than before.

For me I feel like a large part of it is that no one else shares the same excitement that I do. If I share something I think is really cool and everyone is like “I don’t get it”, those thoughts inevitably just murk my brain.

Re: Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

#120

Post by nirvdrum » Wed, Feb 07, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

rujkking wrote: post #94

cedws wrote: post #75

Serenity is one of the only recent OS projects that I think has any potential. It's a very high velocity, high quality project and I think that's down to the community culture Andreas has fostered. They aren't a load of fuddy-duddies who insist on using mailing lists and IRC. Nobody wants to collaborate with a load of grumpy greybeards.

You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…

You're more than free to do with your own time what you wish. These projects aren't harming you in any way. Who cares what enthusiasts want to do for fun? They're not trying to supplant the OS on your desktop. They're learning something and having fun doing it. I love these sorts of projects.

In contrast, many of us treat computers as a magic black box. The abstraction is great for productively building web apps. But, we've lost sight of how things work and I think that's led to steep decline in performance and, perhaps, security. I don't pine for manual resource management in all things, but knowing how syscalls work can help build context on when and why you should use them. Revisiting how to build an OS that isn't rooted in decades-old Linux or BSD code could be really instructive.