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Needs citation: what is this "widespread creative drain among the hacker community" that Unix has somehow induced? (Also, what are the levels of "path dependen

Needs citation: what is this "widespread creative drain among the hacker community" that Unix has somehow induced? (Also, what are the levels of "path dependence" that you're referring to?) To me, the advances in operating systems in the last fifteen years have been deeper than the programmatic abstractions -- ZFS, jails/zones/containers, DTrace, MDB, etc. Unix has inspired these advances, not confined them. Finally, in terms of Spring: I think it's more accurate to describe you as romanticizing it than me as reviling it. As I have outlined for you before[1], I merely ran the beast -- and it was horrific, even when used as intended. It's certainly not lost: I have a copy in my basement, if no other copy exists, and I would gladly make it available to you if only to force you to see it as it was and not as you wish it to have been. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10138958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10138958

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Also, what are the levels of "path dependence" that you're referring to? A process model which makes checkpointing and migration difficult, hierarchical file systems, lack of OS-level typed modules, strict kernel-userspace segmentation, the various flavors of user and group IDs for isolation and privilege segmentation, global namespaces (somewhat minimized these days, but nothing close to a Spring name service or even Plan 9 namespaces), the file interface and the pseudo-file travesty of "special files" (fuck ioctl(2)s), Berkeley sockets, units of execution/threads bound to address spaces/tasks (at least in userspace), no capabilities (modulo bolt-ons like Capsicum which are still experimental), lack of reliable kernel process management and child tracking primitives necessitating supervision schemes, general trend towards monolithic kernel subsystems rather than userland services, lack of reliable messaging IPC mechanism but instead proliferation of many primitive and homegrown solutions, lack of orthogonal persistence, frequent lack of proper metadata indexing/relational querying beyond seeking for byte streams, dynamic linking instead of dynamic binding, lack of network transparency, etc. etc. ZFS, jails/zones/containers, DTrace, MDB, etc. Nothing about those are innovative. You just have an obvious bias for Sun, given your origins. ZFS was an incremental evolution from VxFS and IBM systems. Same for containers, coming from IBM i and possibly earlier. DTrace isn't even necessary on systems with dynamic object introspection. mdb? Seriously? If you consider that one of the great advances in OS research over the past 15 years, may God help OS research. I have a copy in my basement, if no other copy exists, and I would gladly make it available to you if only to force you to see it as it was and not as you wish it to have been. I will gladly accept that challenge and write an article documenting my experiences. Please give me an email address to contact.
- paxcoder 11y ago
  Nice overview of unix systems legacy. Would you be interesting in contributing your vision of a modern operating system to a common document? I've been wanting to start a casual WG for this purpose with someone for a while now.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Also, what are the levels of "path dependence" that you're referring to? A process model which makes checkpointing and migration difficult, hierarchical file systems, lack of OS-level typed modules, strict kernel-userspace segmentation, the various flavors of user and group IDs for isolation and privilege segmentation, global namespaces (somewhat minimized these days, but nothing close to a Spring name service or even Plan 9 namespaces), the file interface and the pseudo-file travesty of "special files" (fuck ioctl(2)s), Berkeley sockets, units of execution/threads bound to address spaces/tasks (at least in userspace), no capabilities (modulo bolt-ons like Capsicum which are still experimental), lack of reliable kernel process management and child tracking primitives necessitating supervision schemes, general trend towards monolithic kernel subsystems rather than userland services, lack of reliable messaging IPC mechanism but instead proliferation of many primitive and homegrown solutions, lack of orthogonal persistence, frequent lack of proper metadata indexing/relational querying beyond seeking for byte streams, dynamic linking instead of dynamic binding, lack of network transparency, etc. etc. ZFS, jails/zones/containers, DTrace, MDB, etc. Nothing about those are innovative. You just have an obvious bias for Sun, given your origins. ZFS was an incremental evolution from VxFS and IBM systems. Same for containers, coming from IBM i and possibly earlier. DTrace isn't even necessary on systems with dynamic object introspection. mdb? Seriously? If you consider that one of the great advances in OS research over the past 15 years, may God help OS research. I have a copy in my basement, if no other copy exists, and I would gladly make it available to you if only to force you to see it as it was and not as you wish it to have been. I will gladly accept that challenge and write an article documenting my experiences. Please give me an email address to contact.

paxcoder 11y ago
Nice overview of unix systems legacy. Would you be interesting in contributing your vision of a modern operating system to a common document? I've been wanting to start a casual WG for this purpose with someone for a while now.