51–60 of 80 posts
Virtualization. Capabilities. Kernel-bypass networking. Static code analysis. Verified-pointer microarchitectures. Coverage-guided fuzzing. Systems software research has come a long way since 2000.
Virtualization and static code analysis existed before 2000. Granted - the tooling improved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. In 2000, people mostly still used Windows 9x. A single-user system with no sandboxing and no built-in firewall.
He's talking about research, so you have to look at the state of the art, not what the masses were still using. In 2000 I used FreeBSD, which was pretty good. It had jails [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail ] by then, which a reasonable person might still prefer to modern Linux containers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtualization: See VMS (1977) Kernel-bypass networking: See microkernels (1967) Need I go on?
Yes, please do demonstrate an ancient source of coverage-guided fuzzing, I would be very interested in that.
The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess. And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
> academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Does "started in academia" not count? Because that'd give you easy counter-examples, e.g. Scala, Spark.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security. In 2000, people mostly still used Windows 9x. A single-user system with no sandboxing and no built-in firewall.
He's talking about research, so you have to look at the state of the art, not what the masses were still using. In 2000 I used FreeBSD, which was pretty good. It had jails [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail ] by then, which a reasonable person might still prefer to modern Linux containers.
NTFS 3.0 with file encryption support
Logical disk management for dynamic disks & expansion of a logical partition over multiple physical disks. Without a reformat.
Distributed file systems & hierarchical storage management.
MMC with group policy control, active directory, centralized event viewer for OS & application events, and system service management
Speaking of which, system services were a thing that actually existed and were managed (systemd fighting still continues, so Linux still hasn't "caught up" on this)
Plug & Play ACPI support (technically windows 98 was the first to support this but it was so broken it was a joke - Linux lagged by a few years and didn't really support it until 2.6).
User-mode print drivers
Network QoS
time service with SNTP support
This article predates it, but OS X (particularly after it mutated into iOS) represents probably the biggest source of systems innovation in the two decades after this article. Apple is very secretive, so their systems research often isn’t known outside the company until it’s actually going into a product. OS X was modern for its time, but where they’ve really pushed the envelope is with iOS. They can simply move fast…
iOS was innovative at a UI/UX level, definitely. But I can't really think of anything they did at a systems level that was at all innovative?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have pretty great isolation between programs on iOS and Android.
I hear you, but security wise this point is countered by the fact that every (n-1) iOS operating system has a public lpe exploit available. A user might not be able to jailbreak their idevice, but a hacker can.
I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the s…
Would you say that wasn’t the case during the past 20 years (2000-2019)? Or do you consider all that period to be “early 2000’s”?