I wonder if we can't do something much better than the old UNIX paradigm today.
25 years ago there was an avalanche of new operating systems and if somebody asked me at that time, I was sure we will have much better operating systems in the future using fresh ideas.
I am not saying UNIX is bad, just that I would like to see some advancements in the OS area, beside improving UNIX kernels and APIs.
The lack of vertical integration in the modern stack is surprising. We’ve spent 30 years treating the UNIX paradigm as the "end of history," while burying ourselves in layers that add zero mechanical value.
I initially thought the containerization movement of the early 2010s would be the first step toward redefining the OS—a way to finally slim things down. Instead, it just became a more efficient way to pack up the same baggage. We created a "reduction" in deployment complexity, but we haven't seen a continued effort to use those tools to actually change the paradigm.
I expected vertically integrated systems to become the norm by now—where building an executable would be an experience similar to containerization, but resulting in a lean, data-centric unikernel.
Instead, we are burning CAPEX on YAML sidecars in K8s clusters and N-tier abstractions that exist solely due to the large heterogeneity of the deployments that they never should have entered in the first place. We are spending more energy on the friction between layers than on the actual business of computation.
I was hoping for a return to sanity with the DBOS [1] research, looked like an attempt to rethink systems from first principles. But it seems that effort hasn't fully kicked off in the way the industry desperately needs.
Now I am wondering how VMS handled this. Do VMS programs just get no chance to recover from arithmetic faults? That is, do whatever the VMS equivalent is to masking sigfpe in unix.
Was there ever a source drop for VMS on vax? Probably hard to impossable to figure out if not
I wonder if we can't do something much better than the old UNIX paradigm today.
25 years ago there was an avalanche of new operating systems and if somebody asked me at that time, I was sure we will have much better operating systems in the future using fresh ideas.
I am not saying UNIX is bad, just that I would like to see some advancements in the OS area, beside improving UNIX kernels and APIs.
The lack of vertical integration in the modern stack is surprising. We’ve spent 30 years treating the UNIX paradigm as the "end of history," while burying ourselves in layers that add zero mechanical value.
I initially thought the containerization movement of the early 2010s would be the first step toward redefining the OS—a way to finally slim things down. Instead, it just became a more efficient way to pack up the same baggage. We created a "reduction" in deployment complexity, but we haven't seen a continued effort to use those tools to actually change the paradigm.
I expected vertically integrated systems to become the norm by now—where building an executable would be an experience similar to containerization, but resulting in a lean, data-centric unikernel.
Instead, we are burning CAPEX on YAML sidecars in K8s clusters and N-tier abstractions that exist solely due to the large heterogeneity of the deployments that they never should have entered in the first place. We are spending more energy on the friction between layers than on the actual business of computation.
I was hoping for a return to sanity with the DBOS [1] research, looked like an attempt to rethink systems from first principles. But it seems that effort hasn't fully kicked off in the way the industry desperately needs.
[1]: https://dsail.csail.mit.edu/index.php/dbos/
The only thing worse than spaghetti code is spaghetti services.
Ask yourself which one is easier to diagnose and debug.
If you haven't already, take a look at Plan 9, and maybe Rob Pikes talk "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy"
I tried but could only find the slides:
https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/
Do you have a link?
For the state of the art, look at seL4[0], LionsOS[1] and Genode[2].
0. https://sel4.systems/
1. https://www.lionsos.org/
2. https://sel4.systems/
Now I am wondering how VMS handled this. Do VMS programs just get no chance to recover from arithmetic faults? That is, do whatever the VMS equivalent is to masking sigfpe in unix.
Was there ever a source drop for VMS on vax? Probably hard to impossable to figure out if not
https://web.archive.org/web/20171028043200/http://h41379.www...
apparently some at some point?
interesting read, makes me think kernel programming isnt that much harder than app programming, just more manuals to read and hardware to understand.
edit: not to dismiss kernel programmers, you people are awesome!
Attention to detail is a lot more important. But the kernel is just a program.
try it :D its a lot of fun!