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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)

#161

Post by nirvdrum »

rujkking wrote: post #153
nirvdrum wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My concern is more so that this project will burn up real resources and be abandoned. You’re highlighting how subjective things can be and I don’t disagree. What isn’t subjective is the generations of the 1900s are the first to leave behind an existential threat driven by wasteful economic choices and they seem to be indifferent to doing so just to have fun. Myself and lot of other software engineers I have worked wi…

Some people grow gardens. Some rebuild cars. Others 3D print things. Others yet enjoy woodworking. One the grand features of our current society is you're not working 14 hour days, seven days a week in a factory. Without a doubt, there are those working multiple jobs and still struggling to make ends meet. But, fortunately, many are able to work a single job and live a relatively comfortable life. Those that can often have hobbies. It helps them unwind and maybe even enjoy life a little since otherwise so much of it is spent working or sleeping. It's downtime and largely considered positive for mental health and, consequently, one's ability to contribute to society.

Most people aren't solving deep societal needs in their free time. If you want to limit it to software, most of us have jobs that hardly improve society or the planet. Most open source code isn't advancing society. What I don't understand is why you've singled out the participants of this particular project for your ire.

I don't know any of the individuals involved personally. My guess is they're not the ones that built physical products with PFCs, ran coal-powered factories and operated strip mining operations, designed nuclear weaponry, or even fly personal jets. I'd hazard to say your average front-end developer chugging through batteries with inefficient frameworks is doing more harm than this project.

If your aim is to clean up the tech industry, I think that's laudable. I believe tech people have for the most part shirked their own contribution to our carbon footprint or other societal needs. But, I think you'll find there are much bigger targets actively doing harm (or certainly not helping things) regularly because it's profitable and/or convenient.

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

#162

Post by rstat1 »

exe34 wrote: post #117
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.

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.

Windows 95 brought us those god-awful cascading menus that would disappear the second you missed a hover target by a single pixel. I for one am glad those died out.

I don't understand how anyone could say that mess was good.

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

#163

Post by PlunderBunny »

KerrAvon wrote: post #145
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the classic definition of .... "graybeards"... we have no nostalgia for Win95. Back then we were fighting tooth and nail to undermine MS's monopoly, and Linux as you see it today is the product of that. I will admit the first times I saw the Win95 interface I found it appealing. Though they actually cribbed a lot form the NeXTstep UI, and I'm much more fond of that . I prefer the Sun OpenLook UI for nostalgia valu…

The nostalgia for Win95 is sick, honestly. If you want to use a really good unstable mid-90's OS, classic Mac OS is right there.

As I grow more and more disillusioned with modern computing, I catch myself thinking “just give me macOS classic with a few nice-to-haves bolted on, like a modern browser.” (Yeah, I know those nice-to-haves are probably a lot more work than the rest of the OS).

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

#164

Post by cmrdporcupine »

PlunderBunny wrote: post #163
KerrAvon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nostalgia for Win95 is sick, honestly. If you want to use a really good unstable mid-90's OS, classic Mac OS is right there.

As I grow more and more disillusioned with modern computing, I catch myself thinking “just give me macOS classic with a few nice-to-haves bolted on, like a modern browser.” (Yeah, I know those nice-to-haves are probably a lot more work than the rest of the OS).

Yes, well, not crashing all over the place because of lack of memory protection would be nice.

I still don't think Apple made the right UI choices in their transition to OS X.

Something that looks more like the early Rhapsody copies would be nicer.

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

#165

Post by slater »

rujkking wrote: post #159
slater wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also specifically mentioned in the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There’s also a bunch there about how targeting others and posting complaints about others makes for uninteresting reading so avoid it Just saying

so yeah, don't do that.

just saying

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

#166

Post by PeterisP »

josephg wrote: post #13
shiroiuma wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this "hacky"? I've long wondered why databases need to be on filesystems, other than simply convenience. If you think about it, a filesystem is, itself, basically a database (not a relational one of course). So it seems like you could improve performance a lot by eliminating the filesystem layer and going straight to direct disk access. Also, how this would be done would probably change depending on whether yo…

Lots - maybe most - applications need to essentially run their own mini database to store user data. I obviously don't want a partition per application, or per word document. Abstracting away your hard disk is literally the job of your filesystem.

For server applications, the trends of virtualization and microservices mean that having "machine" dedicated to running a single application is a very common scenario, and also for server VMs running a bunch of apps it is not obvious that having a partition per application is an issue, it would be trivial for the VM initialization scripts to automagically configure a dedicated partition for each DB.

Having a OS+filesystem running a virtual OS+filesystem running a database has all kinds of redundant caching, and we could systematically skip a layer here.

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

#167

Post by josephg »

bakul wrote: post #147
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…

> The current filesystem semantics are terrible for databases There was at least one Unix startup (IIRC it was Tolerant Systems) in mid 80s that applied transactional semantics to filesystem operations. I did some contract work for them and found the performance was absolutely abysmal and the system had some deadlocks. Now may be their implementation was not great but I suspect the converse is also true: database sem…

There was at least one database from the mid 80s with abysmal performance and deadlocks too. But plenty of modern databases are fast and correct. The fact this one startup 40 years ago didn’t solve the problem doesn’t say a lot about whether I’ll be able to. Honestly the fact there are some dead bodies on the mountain makes it more fun to give it a go and see how I do.

To be frank, judging by the code I’ve seen over the years, most engineers don’t have a lot of experience or skill at making software run fast.

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

#168

Post by bakul »

josephg wrote: post #167
bakul wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current filesystem semantics are terrible for databases There was at least one Unix startup (IIRC it was Tolerant Systems) in mid 80s that applied transactional semantics to filesystem operations. I did some contract work for them and found the performance was absolutely abysmal and the system had some deadlocks. Now may be their implementation was not great but I suspect the converse is also true: database sem…

There was at least one database from the mid 80s with abysmal performance and deadlocks too. But plenty of modern databases are fast and correct. The fact this one startup 40 years ago didn’t solve the problem doesn’t say a lot about whether I’ll be able to. Honestly the fact there are some dead bodies on the mountain makes it more fun to give it a go and see how I do. To be frank, judging by the code I’ve seen over…

Proof is in the pudding etc.! I'm certainly curious how well your design & implementation will turn out. Good luck with your project!!

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

#169

Post by exe34 »

rstat1 wrote: post #162
exe34 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows 95 brought us those god-awful cascading menus that would disappear the second you missed a hover target by a single pixel. I for one am glad those died out. I don't understand how anyone could say that mess was good.

What are you talking about, cascading menus that disappear are still with us, they moved to the web!

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

#170

Post by josephg »

dhruvrajvanshi wrote: post #131
josephg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If all programs run in ring 0, you can just run them all in the same virtual memory space. Then you don’t need TLB flushes at all. Of course, one bad program could bring the whole system down but that’s the price you pay.

But if programs were written in wasm, that problem goes away. Wasm prevents bad memory accesses by doing memory protection in software. (Every array or pointer access is bounds checked).

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