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The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

jonescape.com

1–10 of 12 posts

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#3
Extremely annoying to view. Please show the entire slides at once, or at least have an option for this.

If it is important to show them one part at a time, please indicate how many steps there are on this slide, so that I can press next quickly to skip the "animation" without risking skipping to the next slide.

Can't comment on the content as I was too annoyed with the UX to read past a few slides.

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#5
post #4

Unfortunately I got frustrated with the presentation and gave up before figuring out the point. Seems to be a something about an ocaml kernel with containers on top.

It's about unikernels, where a small kernel, a single application and a limited set of service (ideally just what the application itself needs) are compiled to a single consolidated binary running on a barebones virtualisation host (e.g. Xen).

The most well-known one does seem to be MirageOS[0], an OCaml unikernel. See http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628 for a paper on Mirage, though the broad strokes would be applicable to any unikernel (and a list thereof is provided in Table 2).

If you followed Thomas Leonard's entries on porting 0install to OCaml, he subsequently posted a few entries on playing with mirage[1]

[0] https://mirage.io

[1] http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/07/28/my-first-unikernel/ with discussions[2][3]

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109485

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c1soi/my_firs...

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#6

Extremely annoying to view. Please show the entire slides at once, or at least have an option for this. If it is important to show them one part at a time, please indicate how many steps there are on this slide, so that I can press next quickly to skip the "animation" without risking skipping to the next slide. Can't comment on the content as I was too annoyed with the UX to read past a few slides.

For the future viewer, the introduction stops at http://jonescape.com/tisos/#/26, then you get the important names and links (up until ~50)

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#7
I would argue that "It works on my box" is actually a benefit in some cases, since it exposes the fact that the code doesn't work on all machines and should be altered or changed to fix that. If all of the people in the development team have exactly the same hardware, OS, programs, etc. then that problem could still be present, but because it isn't found it could leak to production code.

If each individual's computing environment has diverged, then there is at least more of a chance of finding such problems before they get to production code.

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#9
Can't say I disagree about the format of the slides. Subsequent sharing wasn't really a primary consideration; it was only intended as a tool to assist me in my presentation. I will see if I can convert it to something a little more standalone-consumable. Of course, it will still be missing the extemporaneous talk that was intended to be the actual presentation, so it will still surely be somewhat lacking.

Thanks for the critique!

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

#10
post #7

I would argue that "It works on my box" is actually a benefit in some cases, since it exposes the fact that the code doesn't work on all machines and should be altered or changed to fix that. If all of the people in the development team have exactly the same hardware, OS, programs, etc. then that problem could still be present, but because it isn't found it could leak to production code. If each individual's computin…

An example of the kind of divergence I'm speaking of would be varying jdk or libraries versions; where there is no expectation that all these deviations would be supported. These concerns are encapsulated in the container.
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