31–40 of 76 posts
"Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years."
Now, a modern Mac Pro can do 488250 million instructions per second. Needless to say, we've had progress in these last couple of decades.
Before we get into - "Oh not this again!" and "Duh! but Linux Won!" and "Microkernels are still a better design"... Remember, today's lucky 10,000... http://xkcd.com/1053/ Actually, I always enjoy reading this whenever it comes up. I was just about to start a university computing science degree course at this time and was reading Tanenbaum in preparation. This was a debate that was alive for years throughout the comp…
The following statement puts things in perspective, doesn't it. "Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years." Now, a modern Mac Pro can do 488250 million instructions per second. Needless to say, we've had progress in these last couple of decades.
Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking. Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over.
The funny thing is that I would mostly agree with him. The important detail is "Among the people who actually design operating systems." Linus would agree that Linux is not designed. It evolved. Very few OSs are designed these days. The QNX microkernel is quite successful. L4 also seems to do well. The BSD Mach microkernel is still around. Minix is still around, although its reliability approach (similar to Erlang, l…
I think microkernels will have their day in some part of the future.
How feasible is it to radically refactor an operating system? Would it be possible to gradually incorporate all the insights of operating system research into Linux/BSD/$otherProductionReadyOS or is it always necessary to start again from scratch?
NetBSD is a good starting point as the drivers are portable (via rump kernel; eg Genode uses this for their filesystem drivers) so you can reuse them in another OS as a starting point, plus it is reasonably simple as OSs go, plus the BSD license is friendly.
There were a bunch of related talks at https://operatingsystems.io/
How feasible is it to radically refactor an operating system? Would it be possible to gradually incorporate all the insights of operating system research into Linux/BSD/$otherProductionReadyOS or is it always necessary to start again from scratch?
Still it proves that yes, refactoring can work. Real-time is one of those super-duper invasive features. So if it works for real-time we should be able to refactor in other features.
I did some small contributions to GNU Hurd years ago, but still, this made me giggle: Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
Looking back it's amazing how much traction the gnu userland tools gained and how little (zero?) their kernel gained. I'm not going to call it a wasted effort, because I appreciate there being other "Unix"-systems around in case Linux ever goes bad, but at this point it seems to be a whole lot of work invested for nothing. Maybe things will change 5 years down the road when people abandon systemd and DMD had matured,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, a microkernel is harder to implement than a monolithic one and from a theoretical standpoint is a better design, IMO it deserves a higher grade in an operating system design course. Let's not mythify the 1992 Linux kernel, which probably wasn't _that_ good.
> from a theoretical standpoint is a better design What about IPC overhead?
Contemporary microkernels like L4 are much, much faster.
I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways. 1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around. 2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unike…
>We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unikernels [1] (and where they might be used [2]). Not only this. Amoeba, Tanenbaum's research OS is a distributed operating system, meaning that many devices could be used as a single system. This would be incredibly useful in our current age where everyo…