First thing that came to my mind when reading this is Windows' WMI with its WQL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WQL
A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
161–170 of 188 posts
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#162All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…
Well, this is very similar to the Haiku project's goals, though of course on many of these fronts we're only partway there. Care to come join us? :)
Join Haiku Project / Write lots of code to make a / Unified OS
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being an RTOS is only necessary if your application has a requirement for real-time response and is also itself designd for bounded-response-time. Ignoring drivers for the moment, your typical desktop application does not have a need for a bounded response time. Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. The underlying drivers, on the other hand, do tend to…
Audio. A great many people work with audio or want to work with audio, and Windows and OSX are lightyears ahead of Linux in terms of ease of use and overall quality. You'd think the PulseAudio fiasco would have improved the situation, but I believe the developers thought as you did, and so built a system that's woefully encumbered with latency. Jack improves the situation WRT latency, but it comes at the cost of an a…
In my experience, jack only manages to avoid xruns on reasonably small yet still too large (5ms) buffers when running as SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR, and only on linux-rt.
Patch sets like -ck simply don't help with this.
Try running cyclictest from rt-tests for a while to see the true horror of Linux behavior.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#164From a sufficiently abstract point of view, one could argue that classic DBMSs are already looking like small operating systems: - are composed of multiple processes; can include process management code - can access hardware directly (for efficient arrangement, caching and retrieval of data) - include support for multiple users, concurrent sessions - stored procedures require compiler tooling and runtime (VM) - can b…
You raise a point - we have a bunch of small operating systems running on top of our existing operating systems. DBMSes, editors (emacs), browsers, and more. There's a great amount of inefficiences being added because everyone is re-inventing OSes and/or DBMSes at every layer.
I often wonder how much more efficient computers would be if we were capable of writing optimal machine code for whatever task we wanted to accomplish. No layers, just efficient code written at the lowest level for everything.
It obviously wouldn't be worth the effort, but how many times faster would our computers be?
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#165All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…
> Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of hardware, application, and game support in Linux, and MacOS "requiring" Apple hardware
I'm pretty sure you've discovered a simplex (a thing like a CAP triangle) here! These all trade off against one-another:
1. highly-integrated first-class hardware support
2. support for all third-party components under the sun
3. low security-vulnerability surface (and thus a long security-critical update cadence)
Windows picks 1 and 2 at the expense of 3. Linux picks 2 and 3 at the expense of 1. Apple picks 1 and 3 at the expense of 2. (Hackintoshes trade some of 1 for some of 2, ending up fully satisfying neither.)
I'm pretty sure you can't have 100% of all three, no matter your resources. They're trade-offs, not in time/effort, but in design-space.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
ResEdit was an interesting idea. It suffered from a major problem - terrible data integrity. The original version had to work on floppies, with very slow seeks and writes. So it didn't reach an consistent state until you were all done and closed the resource fork of the file. Attempts were made to use it as a database, but stuff was always getting corrupted. The original MacOS suffered badly from being a cram job int…
And it's tragic when you consider that LisaOS had multitasking, process separation, and I believe a hardware MMU. The Mac grabbed most of the good UI aspects of the Lisa, but stripped out all the decent OS concepts. It worked to sell the first Macintoshes, but didn't scale out later, and by that time they'd killed off the Lisa.
Yeah, and the Lisa cost $10,000 and the Mac 128k was $2500. You can debate the merits of the hw/sw tradeoffs that got to those price points, but it was pretty clear at the time that Apple wasn't going to take over the world with the Lisa.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Stability and flexibility from Linux I might have been using linux wrong. Because as a daily driver media consumption device, it has been anything but stable. I suspect it is because it was a laptop with a discrete graphics card, which for some reason completely trips linux up. > Forced updates in Windows 10 I think this has been solved in a recent update
Linux is extremely stable as a headless server. We have instances running for years with no issues. That is where Linux's reputation for stability most likely comes from. However as a desktop machine mainly used for media consumption I would take windows over linux any day. No doubt due to poor graphics and audio driver support.
> No doubt due to poor graphics and audio driver support.
Dell Precision with Intel, Ubuntu Mate, rock solid. VLC, 4k monitor, great media tools. No telemetry and UI shenanigans.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being an RTOS is only necessary if your application has a requirement for real-time response and is also itself designd for bounded-response-time. Ignoring drivers for the moment, your typical desktop application does not have a need for a bounded response time. Desktop applications typically do not fail due to a dialog box being popped up a few milliseconds late. The underlying drivers, on the other hand, do tend to…
There is some benefit to real-time ability in an OS. Mainly, to prevent one application from freezing up the system. That's happened to me both on Windows and Linux. Took work to wrestle it back into my control again. I remember people who used the QNX demo disk on old machines describing how they could do big compiles in the background with the system still responsive to input. I'm guessing the parts interacting wit…
Thats priorities at work.... not bounded-response-time.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#169All I want is an OS that has as few of the weaknesses as possible and all the best things about all the current major operating systems; examples: Flagship gaming support from Windows, Stability and flexibility from Linux, and Design principles from MacOS. Each of those three operating systems have some weaknesses that makes me jump between them quite often. Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of…
> Things like: Forced updates in Windows 10, certain lack of hardware, application, and game support in Linux, and MacOS "requiring" Apple hardware I'm pretty sure you've discovered a simplex (a thing like a CAP triangle) here! These all trade off against one-another: 1. highly-integrated first-class hardware support 2. support for all third-party components under the sun 3. low security-vulnerability surface (and th…
Is linux really 2 and 3 at the expense of 1? I've had several issues where hardware doesn't work on windows, but does work on linux.
Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is some benefit to real-time ability in an OS. Mainly, to prevent one application from freezing up the system. That's happened to me both on Windows and Linux. Took work to wrestle it back into my control again. I remember people who used the QNX demo disk on old machines describing how they could do big compiles in the background with the system still responsive to input. I'm guessing the parts interacting wit…
Thats priorities at work.... not bounded-response-time.
Good point. A little out of my element here. :)
Real-time might help in another way: mitigating covert channels. Gotta know the timing of secret-handling code. Then, make the observed timing fixed-length or random. Don't always need the timing to do that, though. For instance, the separation kernels just need timing for the partitions with whole thing stopping regardless of where code is at.
One last benefit might be easier performance monitoring and diagnostics. If it's predictable, one might be able to assign a range or profile to it. Then, raise alarm if anything goes out of profile. Just speculating here: never built one.