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A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

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Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#61

Post by snvzz »

Oh, it's the every OS sucks story again.

It's all about the user experience. System should be friend and still enable the user to increasingly get more out of the computer. It also needs to be extremely responsive.

AmigaOS got a lot right back in the 80s. BeOS (and now Haiku as spiritual successor) took a lot from that (system kits vs amiga's default set of shared libraries, and the concept of datatypes) and added some concepts of its own.

Meantime, the mainstream systems have only gone backwards.

My dream of a general purpose OS is definitely an open source microkernel, multiserver RTOS with capabilities and an user experience that builds on those two systems. It is important for it to be an RTOS, as unbounded response times would make the system fail as a general purpose system and as a personal computer system.

The closest existing system would be Genode. It currently only meets the technical side unfortunately, but it could meet the user experience requirements with some work.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#63

Post by tryinq69 »

When are we going to truq u? You are almost as high profile here as Thomas ptazec and the venerably over full idlewords. I'd not truq idlewords though come out with it. Tyingq has to be a Maine trucker. Let's for the good of all of us.

I see it as

1) Thomas ptachech 2) idlewords you ass inferior trastard piece of skit

And never less 0) tryingq which is you.

Are you so ascetic? Don't tell us you got a text buddy on the side

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#64

Post by dgellow »

Just a general question: Do you think there is a market for a new operating system? The cost of building something better or equal to mainstream systems seem too high to even consider challenging the status quo.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#65

Post by repolfx »

dgellow wrote: post #64

Just a general question: Do you think there is a market for a new operating system? The cost of building something better or equal to mainstream systems seem too high to even consider challenging the status quo.

I think there is, but it'd need to be very different to existing operating systems to justify itself, and in ways that other OS's can't simply adopt for themselves. In practice that means radical architectural change, and even then you'd re-use a lot of code.

For such a project you don't really want to just adopt existing ideas and implement them. I don't really understand why Google is doing Fuschia for this reason: architecturally it's nothing special. Is the GPLd Linux so bad? It took them this far.

If I were to do a new OS I'd explore ideas like all software running on a single language-level VM with a unified compiler (e.g. a JVM), a new take on software distribution ... maybe fully P2P, rethinking filesystems and the shell, making it radically simpler to administer than Linux, etc. You'd need to pick a whole lot of fights and make a lot of controversial decisions to justify such a lot of work: you'd need to be right about things other people are wrong about, not just once but multiple times. Then maybe if people see it working well they'd join you and port existing software, albeit, the porting process would inevitably involve some rewriting or even deeper changes, as if you can just run existing software and get all the benefits you probably didn't change anything important.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#66

Post by skissane »

tyingq wrote: post #58
skissane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or AS/400, which is more or less a SQL database. People keep on saying that, but how really true is it? Many operating systems come with bundled relational databases–e.g. most Linux distributions come with more than one relational database implementation bundled. Does that make Linux "more or less a SQL database"? How deeply integrated is DB2/400 into the OS/400 kernel (or equivalent term, such as "System Licensed…

TPF might be a better example. It's pretty much a distributed nosql database delivered as an OS.

If we are going to talk about NoSQL databases as an OS, we could also talk about early implementations of MUMPS and PICK, each of which was once upon a time delivered as a standalone operating system. (It's different now; at some point each were ported to run as packages on top of more mainstream operating systems such as Unix or VMS, and more recently Linux and Windows.)

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#67

Post by pwpwp »

snvzz wrote: post #61

Oh, it's the every OS sucks story again. It's all about the user experience. System should be friend and still enable the user to increasingly get more out of the computer. It also needs to be extremely responsive. AmigaOS got a lot right back in the 80s. BeOS (and now Haiku as spiritual successor) took a lot from that (system kits vs amiga's default set of shared libraries, and the concept of datatypes) and added so…

Genode is really great, check it out: https://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations/

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#68

Post by twhitmore »

simonh wrote: post #47
kensai wrote: post #33

Can someone describe the NEGATIVE aspects of having a database-OS?

First enumerate all of the constraints and guarantees your database provides. All the basic minimum services it provides for every access. Look at the memory it takes to provide those, and the processor utilisation overhead to perform all those checks, and services such as to guarantee ACID compliance, guarantee referential integrity, enforce a global type system, etc, etc. Every single access of every single piece o…

You're describing the fact that OS apis are typed, and check state for validity. That's already the case and OS system calls already incur those costs.

In a database, preparing a query compiles the access plan (ie all the above) on the server side. There's no reason it would be any less efficient than an OS call today.

Could in fact be more efficient, since you would probably be able to leverage set-based operations on the server (ie OS) side rather than iterating everything on the caller.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#69

Post by sverige »

isostatic wrote: post #25
jotm wrote: post #13

My ultimate OS is Linux, but it's rock stable, supports all hardware and runs OSX and Windows software natively. Heh

Linux is a kernel

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Re: A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)

#70

Post by randomerr »

My dream is simple OS that works kinda like DOS: * Micro OS - Boot base from floppy drive if need be * Let me edit a text file to left put in the pieces I wants instead of a hundred pieces I don't * Includes BASIC language that build build a binary * Includes text based GUI for a text editor * Allow me to pick the drivers I want

I like concept of some Linux OS'es but the ecosystem has got some huge it takes an expert to truly understand it. For a server I really only need a network drivers, SSH client, and the server software. I maybe nostalgic but I miss the good old days.

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