5 ms·

lsub has done so many interesting Plan 9 projects which are so little known (and used). I have tried to read most of nemo's papers, but I admit I haven't actual

lsub has done so many interesting Plan 9 projects which are so little known (and used). I have tried to read most of nemo's papers, but I admit I haven't actually used much of his software. Nowadays it seems that his projects are all self-contained rather than being userspace software for traditional Plan 9. There is still a lot of exploration to be done in the best semantics for implementing 9p servers for various purposes.

jd3 11y ago
I'm just glad that there are still people (prmiarily nemo/francisco ballesteros/9front team/cat-v) hacking away at Plan9/Inferno/[nix/octopus/planb]/etc. In a world where corporate OS research is all but dead, it's definitely nice to see.
- dmytrish 11y ago
  Is corporate OS research really dead? We have L4, seL4, Xen, Mirage OS, Singularity nowadays. It's more like the focus has shifted from traditional OS kernels into virtualization, distributed systems and verification.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Other than formal verification of your Ring 0 and Ring 1 kernel components, (L4 not withstanding- there seems like genuinely interesting innovation coming out of that project), it seems like the rest of those are re-implementations of concepts that have been around for decades. We've gone full circle back into virtualization that IBM System 360 -> z-Series and VAX/VMScluster had. The difference is now you have all this tech that used to cost millions of dollars, available for a few hundred thousand dollars, making it way more accessible to the "non-SAP/Oracle/IBM" demographic. RE: seL4 borrows a lot of TrustedBSD (and to some extent Trusted Solaris). I don't know what the technical implementation details of Xen/XenServer are but once you add all the doo-dads, you've basically got VMware ESX with VMotion/HA/VSan in terms of functionality. I'll give VMware credit because VSan appliances are an easy-to-configure-and-deploy HA fairly-high-IOPS component of the VMware suite that's going to be a EMC SAN killer. The innovation there is how well it's integrated into the rest of the VMware virtual networking/vMotion/HA/disaster recovery suite, though, and not anything you could present at a conference. I haven't looked at Mirage recently but I don't think they're doing anything really groundbreaking (i.e. academically; you won't see papers being presented on it)- a clever unikernel and useful tool but certainly not research. Read the old IBM Redbooks for z/OS and there's are numerous common components between the 1980s implementation of a System/390 running a hypervisor and and the Xen/ESX internals. I can only comment on IBM's stuff with confidence as a former IBMer, but VAX/VMS' clustering probably shares a lot of of what ESX is doing. Other than IBM and MSR, a heavy funder of SPJ at Haskell and F# support as a primary language, definitely paid for itself many times over w/r/t language research the Python 3.5 async await syntax-sugar and, to some extent semantics, which was influenced by C# clearly, derived from F#2. Apple has a few people working on Clang (though not LLVM IIRC, so eh). Facebook has a really interesting language agnostic suite of analysis (primarily static) which I'm tracking carefully because it looks like it has a boatload of interesting capabilities. There's a lot of interesting research going on, but not much of it is done by corporations, Microsoft Research notwithstanding.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Mirage seems like the continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor instead of a raw microarchitecture. I suppose being OCaml is a nice perk, though ultimately their scope is very limited (deploying applications).

jd3 11y ago

I'm just glad that there are still people (prmiarily nemo/francisco ballesteros/9front team/cat-v) hacking away at Plan9/Inferno/[nix/octopus/planb]/etc. In a world where corporate OS research is all but dead, it's definitely nice to see.

dmytrish 11y ago
Is corporate OS research really dead? We have L4, seL4, Xen, Mirage OS, Singularity nowadays. It's more like the focus has shifted from traditional OS kernels into virtualization, distributed systems and verification.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Other than formal verification of your Ring 0 and Ring 1 kernel components, (L4 not withstanding- there seems like genuinely interesting innovation coming out of that project), it seems like the rest of those are re-implementations of concepts that have been around for decades. We've gone full circle back into virtualization that IBM System 360 -> z-Series and VAX/VMScluster had. The difference is now you have all this tech that used to cost millions of dollars, available for a few hundred thousand dollars, making it way more accessible to the "non-SAP/Oracle/IBM" demographic. RE: seL4 borrows a lot of TrustedBSD (and to some extent Trusted Solaris). I don't know what the technical implementation details of Xen/XenServer are but once you add all the doo-dads, you've basically got VMware ESX with VMotion/HA/VSan in terms of functionality. I'll give VMware credit because VSan appliances are an easy-to-configure-and-deploy HA fairly-high-IOPS component of the VMware suite that's going to be a EMC SAN killer. The innovation there is how well it's integrated into the rest of the VMware virtual networking/vMotion/HA/disaster recovery suite, though, and not anything you could present at a conference. I haven't looked at Mirage recently but I don't think they're doing anything really groundbreaking (i.e. academically; you won't see papers being presented on it)- a clever unikernel and useful tool but certainly not research. Read the old IBM Redbooks for z/OS and there's are numerous common components between the 1980s implementation of a System/390 running a hypervisor and and the Xen/ESX internals. I can only comment on IBM's stuff with confidence as a former IBMer, but VAX/VMS' clustering probably shares a lot of of what ESX is doing. Other than IBM and MSR, a heavy funder of SPJ at Haskell and F# support as a primary language, definitely paid for itself many times over w/r/t language research the Python 3.5 async await syntax-sugar and, to some extent semantics, which was influenced by C# clearly, derived from F#2. Apple has a few people working on Clang (though not LLVM IIRC, so eh). Facebook has a really interesting language agnostic suite of analysis (primarily static) which I'm tracking carefully because it looks like it has a boatload of interesting capabilities. There's a lot of interesting research going on, but not much of it is done by corporations, Microsoft Research notwithstanding.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Mirage seems like the continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor instead of a raw microarchitecture. I suppose being OCaml is a nice perk, though ultimately their scope is very limited (deploying applications).