After Announcing Plans To Destroy Microsoft Windows, HP CEO Pulls A Gutsy Move

hp was often really good for hardware, sometimes also for software.

I think it is more of a dig on academic operating systems research, which some say hasn't made any major breakthroughs since the 1980's, possibly because we have been stuck on the same architecture for so long.

IMO, the focus on Windows vs UNIX/Linux or HP vs MS is really missing the point though. If you build a computer as they are suggesting, using non-volatile memory without a deep memory hierarchy, and with an optical interconnect that enables low-latency memory access across a datacenter, then that changes a huge number of the assumptions that led to the operating systems we have now. In order to really take advantage of such a machine, you really need to invent new operating systems. You can hack Linux to run on it, which is what they said they are doing, but you will lose some of the benefits of the hardware because the architecture assumptions are baked into the fundamental design of existing OSes. File systems are one example that is easy to think about. Virtual memory. But consider anything that an OS does and how this new architecture changes it. Consider loading executables to start a process, for example. If there is no difference between memory and disk, then you don't even need to load executables into memory. All files would be memory-mapped in some huge global address space. Programs could jump from memory in one machine to a whole different machine (VM migration? HA?). It really changes everything. We would need new R&D, some of it very fundamental, in order to understand and build systems to take full advantage of such technology. That's all HP is saying in this announcement.

I think HP has a bigger vision here. They aren't looking to build a new car, only this car has electric batteries, they want to build a plane. They announced two OS projects: a modified version of Linux that runs on this new machine, and an entirely new operating system based on fundamentally different assumptions. They only care about Linux as a stopgap, because it allows people to start using this machine while they come up with something better.

The head of HP Labs explained this in his talk. He said it is called "the machine" because 1) they are researchers, not marketing people, and 2) they started thinking of it as not just another server, but a whole new architecture that scales from phones to data centers (as in, THE machine, the only one you need).

> I just want it to be Linux.

You shouldn't.

Linux is a member of a long lineage of operating systems that assume centralized processors connected by a slow bus to volatile memory that only temporarily holds information that needs to be backed up by other devices connected to buses much slower than memory. Every OS in current use is based on these ideas that haven't changed much since the 60's.

If you want, you may imagine Smalltalk running directly on metal with no OS underneath it, with all your data being just part of the image you work with. This is the kind of machine that this makes possible. This was, of course, done in the 80's with technology that was barely sufficient.