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Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

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Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#61

Post by Ericson2314 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #38
Ericson2314 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is all cool, but the issue here is, "the de facto standard technology stack is ossifying upward", as nicely put in http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ I think person is now, in fact, getting paid to redo the firmware as desired, but while commonplace firmware might be uniquely disgusting, the bigger monoliths with even less competition are still the operating systems. Something still needs to be don…

Idk, we have a bunch of VM optimizations and innovations, unikernels. I also think PL innovations are going to usher in a new revolution at the bottom of the stack, just by making systems programming more accessible. I mean, Rust has already made inroads into existing OSes, and the increased accessibility will inevitably lead to more exciting experiments soon.

Yes PL, my home field, I am proud to say has been leading the way. I am certainly more optomistic than I would have been 20 years ago when Rob Pike wrote this, but the war is not yet won.

I fear some of the accidental complexity is more indicative than economic problems than CS ones. E.g. it feels like 1000s of bad abstraction dependencies is mirroring https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/industrial-s... in the real world. (I am not against larger numbers of dependencies, just the bloat that comes from a gazillion square pegs in round holes, and conway's law preventing anyone from trying to do anything about it.)

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#62

Post by Ericson2314 »

andrewjl wrote: post #37
Ericson2314 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systems research has become like orthodox economics, doing various marginal empirics but missing the bigger more qualative macro picture. Maybe the megacorp that is going to hire you wants to see some benchmarks improved, but frankly, that's not what the world needs, or even what would best benefit the megacorp? Economics at least has its uncooth grandfather in Political Economy. Computer systems needs to discover it…

> characterizing bad abstractions and proposing better ones Do you know of anything published that tackles this?

Not really. Closest I know is the PL papers, but even there I would say there is too much new stuff without the criticism. But that is more the general development bottleneck / research traffic jam. With few of those able to make to to the "real world", there is less experience to ground such criticism in.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#63

Post by mikewarot »

He left off the word Operating, and everyone assumed he meant something else... there really are no new operating systems these days, they're all clone of Unix in some fashion.

Containers and virtual machines are stopgap measures we're all adopted because nothing new has come along, and the Unix model of security isn't up to the task.

We need to be able to download code from the internet, and run it against X, where X is a folder, or a photo, or a URL, and know that the Operating System will only let that code access the things we gave it, and nothing else.

We don't have capability based Operating Systems, all we have that's even close is the ham fisted "capability" flags that allow an "app" on a phone to access or location, or not.

Analogy time: If I'm making a cash purchase, and I owe $14.21, I can pull out exact change, or hand over $20, knowing full well that the other party isn't going to magically be able to sell my house, or otherwise cost me more than that $20 capability I chose to exchange with the hope of getting $5.79 in change.

Linux/Unix has no easy way to say... here's a file, run this code with this file as input. The security model of Linux isn't suitable for the any date after the Eternal September of 1993.

The only thing close is to put the code in a virtual machine, or container, to try to limit the scope of the damage a piece of code can do. It's massive overkill, and does the wrong job anyway.

I think he was right, perhaps someone here can convince me otherwise.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#64

Post by Ericson2314 »

mirker wrote: post #60
Ericson2314 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not how academia is structured, but backing up criticism with a protoype of the alternative IMO completely solves the credability problem. From the vantage of the social sciences, where one can only dream of running prototype towns and cities, this is a gift and systems researchers should consider themselves lucky.

What if there are many alternatives? Each implementation would be a challenge to optimize fairly. You’d be forced to have some open competition to make it convincing.

I'm confused what you mean? The prototypes need not be performant, they just must be correct and not outrageously naive to demonstrate the better abstractions/layering is working.

The questions are: is the code beautiful and dose it work?

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#65

Post by rektide »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
rektide wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as counter example to your premise, icd cite projects like Node-RED or Yahoo Pipes. These are little micro-os like systems, environmemts for cobbling together computing. They're higher level than what we might often think of, but they are easily im domain to me at least. And they're definitely about empowering! It's a fault that more systems research isnt about finding more userhfaving abstractions. Naked Objects env…

Users don't attend USENIX, IEEE or ACM conferences.

Very chicken & egg to me! I believe strongly in systems software research. Not just tuning systems & hunting for more throughput or other gains, but making malleable base abstractions & exposing them. Making new means to operate.

In this way, I agree with Pike: systems research often consigns itself to irrelevance. It should be bolder & more visible & more real.

I'll confess I think you're closer to what most people think of. But I also think there's a lack of words ideas & concepts of trying to better ground computing, and I think that work falls into the systems research bucket. And it's not active enough. We're kind of stuck. We are seeing some good systems work, but mainstream computing breached up on the shore 20 years ago & it's this discipline that needs to be the one helping shake us loose & getting us into more novel, useful paradigms of computing. The projects I listed- Yahoo Pipes, Node-RED, Oberon, Naked Objects- we need more big scale tries & there aren't enough.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#66

Post by pjmlp »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #12

I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which…

Distributed systems were already a thing in early 1990's timesharing systems, Sun used to have "The network is the computer" slogan for a reason.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#67

Post by wbl »

turminal wrote: post #47
ekidd wrote: post #42

Since Rob Pike wrote this note in 2000, there have been many commercially important advances in systems software: - iOS and Android: Power-efficient mobile systems, wakelocks, etc. - Docker, Borg and Kubernetes: Container isolation, cluster orchestrators. - Modern browser environments, with high degrees of isolation. - Fast JavaScript runtimes and specialized JITs. - WASM. - Ruby and metaprogramming, which rose to co…

> - iOS and Android: Power-efficient mobile systems, wakelocks, etc. - Docker, Borg and Kubernetes: Container isolation, cluster orchestrators. - Modern browser environments, with high degrees of isolation. - Fast JavaScript runtimes and specialized JITs. - WASM. Would be interesting to know what Rob Pike thinks of all these.

You never heard of Self or the Alto, the JVM, BSD jails/Solaris zones/whatever the 360 had, etc? Mobile I'll give you, but the rest have lots of antecedents.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#68

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

pjmlp wrote: post #66
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #12

I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAMfLPZZhE&list=PLeKd45zvjc... Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which…

Distributed systems were already a thing in early 1990's timesharing systems, Sun used to have "The network is the computer" slogan for a reason.

You are right, of course. However thin clients weren't such a big hit, and a workstation did cost half a fortune. All this was a bit remote, to me, at least.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#69

Post by mirker »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #64
mirker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there are many alternatives? Each implementation would be a challenge to optimize fairly. You’d be forced to have some open competition to make it convincing.

I'm confused what you mean? The prototypes need not be performant, they just must be correct and not outrageously naive to demonstrate the better abstractions/layering is working. The questions are: is the code beautiful and dose it work?

Ah well that requires a lot of manual inspection. Usually there isn’t enough attention span to do that in practice.

Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]

#70

Post by pjmlp »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed systems were already a thing in early 1990's timesharing systems, Sun used to have "The network is the computer" slogan for a reason.

You are right, of course. However thin clients weren't such a big hit, and a workstation did cost half a fortune. All this was a bit remote, to me, at least.

Naturally they were only a reality in university campus and big companies, my first thin clients were X Windows IBM terminals and green phosphor text ones used to connect into DG/UX used on campus.
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