5 ms·

I love how Windows hate runs in HN. Indeed; we were greatly hopeful for it in the days of too many proprietary UNIX(TM) versions, and it began very well, but i

by hga 11y ago

I love how Windows hate runs in HN. Indeed; we were greatly hopeful for it in the days of too many proprietary UNIX(TM) versions, and it began very well, but in truth it started going downhill after the 1st Service Pack for NT 3.51, and was indeed a "mongrel" in the decade of NT4/2000/XP when the graphics driver was moved into the kernel (per pjmlp's comment in this subthread about it being moved back out with Vista, and given how much people avoided Vista for unrelated reasons, you could add another 3 years until Windows 7).

pjmlp 11y ago
Yet Microsoft, Google and Apple are the only companies trying to do some kind of OS research nowadays. The remaining ones have reduced themselves to copying those proprietary UNIX(TM) features into GNU/Linux.
- hga 11y ago
  Well, perhaps only those 3 of the big names in that domain (is IBM completely out of the game?), but e.g. General Dynamics is the commercial player for seL4.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I was only thinking about the mainstream. As far as I am aware, IBM is mostly busy making GNU/Linux run on their mainframes. Aix has lots of cool features, but it is still a fairly typical UNIX. OS/400 kernel is quite cool, using bytecodes as executable format with a kernel level JIT and being object based. But there is very little more to innovate, most likely. I left out General Dynamics, only because I didn't thought of them while writing.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      > As far as I am aware, IBM is mostly busy making GNU/Linux run on their mainframes. I don't think that's right. IBM's main (no pun intended) mainframe OS is zOS, which is derived from OS/390. Linux can run on those mainframes (maybe on top of zOS, I'm not sure), but Linux is not the primary OS for IBM mainframes. And I don't think that IBM is letting zOS stand still while all the effort goes into Linux.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        Yes, but nothing ground breaking in terms of overall architecture.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Neither Microsoft (outside of Research, which let's face it is not too significant on practical Windows), Google or Apple do anything groundbreaking "in terms of overall architecture". You're trying too hard to put the free Unixes in a negative light when, in reality, DragonFly BSD (for instance) is quite more daring than especially XNU, or NT. Most worthwhile OS research these days comes from universities. RPC in monolithic kernels is some 40 years old, I recall the old TRIX kernel at MIT that the GNU project was supposed to adopt way back, being based on that. IBM is actually one of the more progressive companies, the GP is correct. Undoubtedly much more so than Google and Apple, and dare I say Microsoft (outside Research).
        pjmlp 11y ago
        > outside of Research, which let's face it is not too significant on practical Windows Well, WinRT (Ext-VOS), MIDL compiler for WP 8 (from Singularity toolchain), .NET Native, driver validation framework for DDK all started there.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        And just what is so great about MIDL, an MSRPC-derived product, over any other RPC system based on generating client-server stubs, such as MIG or SunRPC? The idea is ancient and actually the classic RPC model is starting to show its age, being quite eloquently critiqued by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as far back as 1988 [1]. WinRT is an application framework out of many historical ones, some impressive and others less so, you're well aware of that. By driver validation, you mean the Driver Verifier tool, kernel-level signed drivers, or...? Those seem incremental, if useful. .NET Native is just another entry in the currently popular line of optimizing language runtimes and VMs, I don't see why it's singled out as particularly impressive. My point is you're overinflating things outside Unixland (and even inside, in the case of Apple - so it's more like free-Unixland) and selectively ignoring the lower profile work going on in free Unixes, even though in general I'd like to see an evolution beyond its paradigms myself. [1] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/publications/euteco-1988.pdf https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/publications/euteco-1988.pdf
- the_why_of_y 11y ago
  Microsoft Research has done some interesting things (Singularity, Barrelfish, Verve). But Apple, nowadays? They still ship that 1980's badly done micro-kernel research experiment Mach together with a whole BSD kernel in the same address space, same thing NeXT has done since 1988. All the innovation since then is in the high-level UX, not the base OS. And Apple nowadays does have the large cash pile that would allow them to waste some money on this kind of research. Google too, their innovative stuff (GoogleFS, BigTable, MapReduce, cloud tooling) is running on top of a UNIX-like base OS (actually Linux, but it could have been any UNIX).
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    > But Apple, nowadays? - Swift - XPC Services / Sandbox - Grand Central Dispatch - IO Kit (C++ drivers) - System Integrity Protection - Metal - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs
    - the_why_of_y 11y ago
      > - Swift No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. > - XPC Services / Sandbox Kinda neat, but OS level isolation mechanisms have been a staple of UNIXes for decades: FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer, Linux seccomp, Solaris Zones, Linux grsecurity, SELinux, NT's security stuff (Windows Integrity Mechanism?)... > - Grand Central Dispatch It's a thread pool - does it have a system-wide idea of how many jobs there are? Neat. But I'm guessing it's just a user-space library + daemon? > - IO Kit (C++ drivers) Being able to implement drivers in an unsafe system programming language that was designed for such use cases like C++ is not particularly remarkable. > - System Integrity Protection From the Wikipedia article I get the impression that this is firstly about refusing to load unsigned kernel drivers, which NT has been doing since Vista (and even some Linux distributions now on UEFI secure boot enabled systems), and secondly about restricting root user with MAC based security mechanisms, similar to Trusted Solaris, Linux grsecurity, or SELinux. > - Metal AMD did it first, with Mantle. Now everybody is doing it. > - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs Guess nobody else has done this one. But wasn't it already the case in NeXTSTEP?

by hga 11y ago

pjmlp 11y ago

Yet Microsoft, Google and Apple are the only companies trying to do some kind of OS research nowadays. The remaining ones have reduced themselves to copying those proprietary UNIX(TM) features into GNU/Linux.

hga 11y ago
Well, perhaps only those 3 of the big names in that domain (is IBM completely out of the game?), but e.g. General Dynamics is the commercial player for seL4.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I was only thinking about the mainstream. As far as I am aware, IBM is mostly busy making GNU/Linux run on their mainframes. Aix has lots of cool features, but it is still a fairly typical UNIX. OS/400 kernel is quite cool, using bytecodes as executable format with a kernel level JIT and being object based. But there is very little more to innovate, most likely. I left out General Dynamics, only because I didn't thought of them while writing.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > As far as I am aware, IBM is mostly busy making GNU/Linux run on their mainframes. I don't think that's right. IBM's main (no pun intended) mainframe OS is zOS, which is derived from OS/390. Linux can run on those mainframes (maybe on top of zOS, I'm not sure), but Linux is not the primary OS for IBM mainframes. And I don't think that IBM is letting zOS stand still while all the effort goes into Linux.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      Yes, but nothing ground breaking in terms of overall architecture.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Neither Microsoft (outside of Research, which let's face it is not too significant on practical Windows), Google or Apple do anything groundbreaking "in terms of overall architecture". You're trying too hard to put the free Unixes in a negative light when, in reality, DragonFly BSD (for instance) is quite more daring than especially XNU, or NT. Most worthwhile OS research these days comes from universities. RPC in monolithic kernels is some 40 years old, I recall the old TRIX kernel at MIT that the GNU project was supposed to adopt way back, being based on that. IBM is actually one of the more progressive companies, the GP is correct. Undoubtedly much more so than Google and Apple, and dare I say Microsoft (outside Research).
        pjmlp 11y ago
        > outside of Research, which let's face it is not too significant on practical Windows Well, WinRT (Ext-VOS), MIDL compiler for WP 8 (from Singularity toolchain), .NET Native, driver validation framework for DDK all started there.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        And just what is so great about MIDL, an MSRPC-derived product, over any other RPC system based on generating client-server stubs, such as MIG or SunRPC? The idea is ancient and actually the classic RPC model is starting to show its age, being quite eloquently critiqued by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as far back as 1988 [1]. WinRT is an application framework out of many historical ones, some impressive and others less so, you're well aware of that. By driver validation, you mean the Driver Verifier tool, kernel-level signed drivers, or...? Those seem incremental, if useful. .NET Native is just another entry in the currently popular line of optimizing language runtimes and VMs, I don't see why it's singled out as particularly impressive. My point is you're overinflating things outside Unixland (and even inside, in the case of Apple - so it's more like free-Unixland) and selectively ignoring the lower profile work going on in free Unixes, even though in general I'd like to see an evolution beyond its paradigms myself. [1] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/publications/euteco-1988.pdf https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/publications/euteco-1988.pdf
the_why_of_y 11y ago
Microsoft Research has done some interesting things (Singularity, Barrelfish, Verve). But Apple, nowadays? They still ship that 1980's badly done micro-kernel research experiment Mach together with a whole BSD kernel in the same address space, same thing NeXT has done since 1988. All the innovation since then is in the high-level UX, not the base OS. And Apple nowadays does have the large cash pile that would allow them to waste some money on this kind of research. Google too, their innovative stuff (GoogleFS, BigTable, MapReduce, cloud tooling) is running on top of a UNIX-like base OS (actually Linux, but it could have been any UNIX).
- pjmlp 11y ago
  > But Apple, nowadays? - Swift - XPC Services / Sandbox - Grand Central Dispatch - IO Kit (C++ drivers) - System Integrity Protection - Metal - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs
  - the_why_of_y 11y ago
    > - Swift No part of the Darwin base OS is implemented in Swift, so it can hardly be considered relevant to OS research. > - XPC Services / Sandbox Kinda neat, but OS level isolation mechanisms have been a staple of UNIXes for decades: FreeBSD jails, Linux VServer, Linux seccomp, Solaris Zones, Linux grsecurity, SELinux, NT's security stuff (Windows Integrity Mechanism?)... > - Grand Central Dispatch It's a thread pool - does it have a system-wide idea of how many jobs there are? Neat. But I'm guessing it's just a user-space library + daemon? > - IO Kit (C++ drivers) Being able to implement drivers in an unsafe system programming language that was designed for such use cases like C++ is not particularly remarkable. > - System Integrity Protection From the Wikipedia article I get the impression that this is firstly about refusing to load unsigned kernel drivers, which NT has been doing since Vista (and even some Linux distributions now on UEFI secure boot enabled systems), and secondly about restricting root user with MAC based security mechanisms, similar to Trusted Solaris, Linux grsecurity, or SELinux. > - Metal AMD did it first, with Mantle. Now everybody is doing it. > - Replacing C by Objective-C on the low level APIs Guess nobody else has done this one. But wasn't it already the case in NeXTSTEP?