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Interview with Andreas Kling of Serenity OS (2022)

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

#131

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

josephg wrote: post #83
throw10920 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would also be interesting to try making all userspace programs be wasm bundles and run them in ring0. But I suspect that will run slower on modern hardware compared to using native binaries and context switching. If you have all of your programs reside in the same virtual memory space (which is the implication with running them in ring 0), then you get a unique performance advantage in that you don't have to inv…

Yeah - if you run things in the kernel you don't need to do TLB flushes or context switches - which can be very expensive. But thats all offset by the fact that wasm code runs slower inherently, because it needs to bounds checks everywhere. I suspect that programs which make a lot of kernel calls would run faster in the kernel in wasm, and programs that are more compute / memory bound will run faster as native proces…

Sorry for being daft, but doesn't this imply that TLB is now shared between all processes? Which means that the cost of flushing the TLB is amortized across context switches? Processes are gonna evict TLB entries from other processes at unpredictable intervals.

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly.

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

#132

Post by thomastjeffery »

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.

The window snapping/tiling feature is nice, but not nearly good enough to replace i3wm.

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

bleachedsleet wrote: post #104
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.

We need more optimism in technology, more looking forward and inspiring the next generation to leave their mark; not pining for a past that’s already been here. Nobody younger than an older millennial who grew up learning computers via Windows 95 has any interest in “retvrning” to this ethos of computing. Hell, I just described myself and even I could care less about this project other than a passing “huh that’s kind…

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by zettabomb »

rujkking wrote: post #125
zettabomb wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, other people find enjoyment in things you might find pointless. Maybe just let them be? Not every waking second needs to be spent on "pushing computing forward" or whatever. Sometimes we just want to do something cool, even if it's useless.

Yeah it’s not cool either though :-/ And I mean from my reference you (and the downvoters) just complained about someone having a different opinion than yours so shrug

It's not complaining about having a different opinion, it's that the way you present it is vitriolic. It doesn't matter (at least to me) if you don't like the project or don't see the point. There's just no reason to insult and demean the project and its creators.

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

#135

Post by dang »

Related ongoing thread:

The Ladybird browser project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449 - Feb 2024 (228 comments)

OP discussed at the time:

Serenity OS: Interview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214371 - Feb 2022 (52 comments)

Corecursive: Serenity OS with Andreas Kling [audio] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30176123 - Feb 2022 (3 comments)

There's a big list of related links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858768 but it's a couple years old now.

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

#136

Post by Mc91 »

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.

> 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

Sometimes the grumpy greybeard fuddy-duddies act as they do due to experience. One can have mailing lists which are very distributed and easy to put on a searchable web page somewhere. One could also tie everything to Github or Gitlab or Atlassian, and then have it pulled, or have rates jacked up, or whatnot. One can go on IRC, and easily migrate from Freenode to Liberanet if need be. One can also go into the walled garden of Slack or Microsoft Teams or some other proprietary format, so that some company can hike rates or pull the rug out at their convenience.

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

#137

Post by throwaway17_17 »

dhruvrajvanshi wrote: post #128
vilunov wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11 Yes I can. Most OSes these days have a OS level fuzzy searching functionality. This has been my preferred way of launching applications on Windows (Win key), Linux (Win key) and MacOS (CMD+Spc). I press a hotkey, type the first few characters of the program I'm trying to go to, and press enter. This is also common in text editors and even…

I also tend to use Win key search for launching programs. I would be interested to see if an OS could focus that use case as a primary means of UI. If it did become central to usage, I’d love to see a commonality emerge across terminal centric and GUI OS styles.

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

#138

Post by cyberax »

cedws wrote: post #79
cyberax wrote: post #70

Another suggestion: replace syscalls with io_uring-like command queues.

Apparently io_uring has been a security nightmare to the point that Google disabled it. I don't know the details but you'd definitely want to ensure you aren't repeating those mistakes.

It's a new way to submit commands, and there are tons of teething issues. Especially considering that Linux had not been designed to work with async APIs from the beginning.

These are not fundamental issues, but definitely something that should be kept in mind.

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

#139

Post by didntcheck »

cbdumas wrote: post #127
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…

> Have either database-like transactions or (at a minimum) write barriers for file operations. Go one step further and have the kernel expose a much more structured view of storage to user space by default. 99.9% of user space programs I've written don't want to deal with file IO, they want a database, or some other way for arbitrary in memory objects to be persisted and shared between processes. There's so much room…

Ironically my understanding is that several operating systems around that time did do that, then Unix came and said "a file is just a bag of bytes in a hierarchical namespace" and we've seemingly never reconsidered

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

#140

Post by astrobe_ »

morphle wrote: post #91
spankalee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really terrible definition that dates from before multitasking, GUIs, and window systems and desktops.

Dan Ingalls wrote this in the Byte Magazine [1] dedicated to Smalltalk-80 in 1981. Smalltalk is its own operating system, it ran on the 1973 Alto that had 16 core processor and was multitasking. It was the first Graphical User Interface (GUI) that introduced the concept of desktops and window systems to the world. So his observation definitely did not date from before multitasking, GUIs, and window systems and deskto…

That was the thinking in the Forth community as well; no absolute frontier between language, library, OS and hardware.

But Ingalls was still wrong, because what actually made that recipe work at that time is that they were programming against a predefined hardware, like game consoles. When you program for predefined hardware, an OS is basically a one man-month project (well, in the 80s at least).

IIRC 1981 was a bit before the IBM PC, whose selling point was its extensibility. Squeak's VM is exactly a way to come back to predefined hardware.

But of course if you get cocky and think you can rid of the OS because your VM is so funtastic, you end up with an inactive project like SqueakNOS. Either because the hardware diversity the OS protected you from hits you like a truck, or because you place strong restrictions on supported hardware - so not everyone who is willing to try it, can actually try it. That's very few people.

Its best hope to evolve from the PoC stage is to be paired with some hardware product. Like Forth when it was chosen for the OLPC project.

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