4 ms·

On top of that, most hardware and protocol implementations are either secret and under NDA or free and open but lacking a full implementation to begin with. Th

On top of that, most hardware and protocol implementations are either secret and under NDA or free and open but lacking a full implementation to begin with. The post contains many idealistic proposals, but most of them boil down to lawyer stuff and money, not technical problems. You can't have nice GPU access because GPU's are secret. You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint. Aside from the shit-ton of reverse-engineering and some cleanroom design, there is very little that can be done to improve this, and no company is going to help, and thus no big pile of resources is coming to save the day. This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all. Fixing this from the ground up, i.e. for x86, would mean something like getting coreboot working on the recent generations of CPU's, and that's not happening at the moment due to lack of information and secret code signing keys needed to actually get a system to work.

digi_owl 9y ago
Why people have such hope for recent efforts in specifying a open CPU ISA.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.
  - notgood 9y ago
    Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem. Maybe. The fact that Moore's Law finally broke may paradoxically help that. When you can simply get 2x the (cost, performance, features) simply by doing nothing, there is no incentive to optimize anything. Now that you can't simply "do nothing", people will start looking at alternatives.
    - tripzilch 9y ago
      Yesss I've been waiting for this moment for nearly two decades haha :) And it's definitely possible, just look at the C64 and Amiga demoscene. Those machines haven't evolved for ages, but they've been making them do one (thought to be) "impossible" thing after another for a very long time after the platforms were essentially considered dead. I've seen things at demoparties around 2000 where C64 demos showed stuff that was thought to be impossible to do on these machines (or so I was told, I'm not an expert on the C64's capabilities, but the thing runs in the single megahertzes and doesn't have a divide instruction, so yeah). One I remember had a part with a veeery low resolution realtime raytracer, about 10fps I think, the scene consisting of just a plane and a sphere (IIRC) ... but it was done on a C64. I wonder how long it will take for PCs though. Moore's Law broke already a few years ago didn't it? But it's not really happening, so far. Or maybe it is. I haven't been keeping up with what's happening in the PC demoscene lately. They used to be way ahead of the curve compared to PC videogames, this changed somewhere in the 200Xs, probably because around that time videogames started getting Hollywood-size budgets.
edraferi 9y ago
> You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint. I feel like enterprise customers could provide some demand for IdealOS for this reason. BigCorps have lots of data and application silos, as well as lots of knowledge workers who are expected to synthesize all that data. There are a lot of smart people who are power users but not devs. (i.e., macro jockies). Something like IdealOS could really increase productivity in these places. Of course you have to deal with all the usual enterprise headaches, mostly security and backwards compatibility. But then they'd pay a premium.
- abraae 9y ago
  If the world worked like this, then BigCorps would probably demand easy to use, intuitive payroll and ERP systems first. But exhibit A: SAP.
- tmzt 9y ago
  I've been suggesting that one way into an enterprise environment is to _give the hardware away_. Make a device with enough RAM, Bluetooth for a mouse, USB ports, and one or two HDMI ports. A stick computer might be a good starting point. Then build your OS for that device. Enable cloud management, integrate with Active Directory, focus on an amazing out of the box web browser experience and expand with an app store for well-thought-out, well designed open and commercial apps. Now give ten to every company with a DUNS number. Sell more with a subscription including more advanced management and enable pushing modified Windows group policies to them. Make it good enough for a casual knowledge worker to use .
sjellis 9y ago
"This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all." My first thought was actually "what about data formats?" These days, most data formats are at least nominally open, but you still need to write code to work with those formats, and most of the existing code is still in C or C++ libraries. The IdealOS will fail instantly as soon as a user receives a DOCX or XLSX file and it displays the document wrong. It can't just launch LibreOffice and use that. Even LibreOffice can't always parse random MS Office documents correctly, and LO represents decades of coder-years.
- tripzilch 9y ago
  Well they could probably come up with some solution perhaps using a virtual LibreOffice to import it or whatnot. We've known for ages that those formats aren't particularly "ideal" and we should be starting letting them go, regardless of dreaming about a hypothetical OS or not. I mean, you could also probably come up with some solution to have a guest over who brings their pet cow without doing too much damage to your nicely decorated apartment. Doesn't mean that's an ideal situation, and it most definitely is no reason to not dream about living somewhere nicer than a stable, and what that would look like to you. The latter part, about dreaming how NICE your house could look like if you did not have to accommodate guests with cows barging into your living room all the time. That is what the article is actually about, he's pretty clear about his awareness that technical possibility is very different from the availability of a realistic road to transition from where we are now to the possibilities he sketches. It's also a very important matter of combating learned helplessness. If you dismiss dreaming about an IdealOS beforehand because there's no way (that you can see now) to get there from where desktop OS's are today, then you most assuredly will miss the opportunity to attain even some of these improvements, were they to come within reach through some circumstance in the future. Also, I remember programming on a 386. And on the one hand it amazes me that the thing in my pocket today is so much more powerful than that old machine, let alone my current desktop. And on the other hand, it infuriates me that some tasks on my desktop today are quite slow when really they have no right to be, and some of these tasks are even things that my 386 used to have no problems with whatsoever (but then, TPX was a ridiculously fast compiler, a true gem). We should not let that slip out of sight, demand better and keep dreaming.

digi_owl 9y ago

Why people have such hope for recent efforts in specifying a open CPU ISA.

pjc50 9y ago
The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem.
- notgood 9y ago
  Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.
- bsder 9y ago
  > The ISA is not important. The economics of open hardware is, and that's a much harder problem. Maybe. The fact that Moore's Law finally broke may paradoxically help that. When you can simply get 2x the (cost, performance, features) simply by doing nothing, there is no incentive to optimize anything. Now that you can't simply "do nothing", people will start looking at alternatives.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    Yesss I've been waiting for this moment for nearly two decades haha :) And it's definitely possible, just look at the C64 and Amiga demoscene. Those machines haven't evolved for ages, but they've been making them do one (thought to be) "impossible" thing after another for a very long time after the platforms were essentially considered dead. I've seen things at demoparties around 2000 where C64 demos showed stuff that was thought to be impossible to do on these machines (or so I was told, I'm not an expert on the C64's capabilities, but the thing runs in the single megahertzes and doesn't have a divide instruction, so yeah). One I remember had a part with a veeery low resolution realtime raytracer, about 10fps I think, the scene consisting of just a plane and a sphere (IIRC) ... but it was done on a C64. I wonder how long it will take for PCs though. Moore's Law broke already a few years ago didn't it? But it's not really happening, so far. Or maybe it is. I haven't been keeping up with what's happening in the PC demoscene lately. They used to be way ahead of the curve compared to PC videogames, this changed somewhere in the 200Xs, probably because around that time videogames started getting Hollywood-size budgets.

edraferi 9y ago

> You can't have things work together because nobody wants to share their secret sauce. Everyone is trying to 'be the best' and get an edge on the rest, but in a way that nobody really profits from it from a technical standpoint. I feel like enterprise customers could provide some demand for IdealOS for this reason. BigCorps have lots of data and application silos, as well as lots of knowledge workers who are expected to synthesize all that data. There are a lot of smart people who are power users but not devs. (i.e., macro jockies). Something like IdealOS could really increase productivity in these places. Of course you have to deal with all the usual enterprise headaches, mostly security and backwards compatibility. But then they'd pay a premium.

abraae 9y ago
If the world worked like this, then BigCorps would probably demand easy to use, intuitive payroll and ERP systems first. But exhibit A: SAP.
tmzt 9y ago
I've been suggesting that one way into an enterprise environment is to _give the hardware away_. Make a device with enough RAM, Bluetooth for a mouse, USB ports, and one or two HDMI ports. A stick computer might be a good starting point. Then build your OS for that device. Enable cloud management, integrate with Active Directory, focus on an amazing out of the box web browser experience and expand with an app store for well-thought-out, well designed open and commercial apps. Now give ten to every company with a DUNS number. Sell more with a subscription including more advanced management and enable pushing modified Windows group policies to them. Make it good enough for a casual knowledge worker to use .

sjellis 9y ago

"This does of course not only go for GPU's, but CPU's and their BSP's and secret management controllers as well, as the dozen or so secret binary blobs you need to get all the hardware to work at all." My first thought was actually "what about data formats?" These days, most data formats are at least nominally open, but you still need to write code to work with those formats, and most of the existing code is still in C or C++ libraries. The IdealOS will fail instantly as soon as a user receives a DOCX or XLSX file and it displays the document wrong. It can't just launch LibreOffice and use that. Even LibreOffice can't always parse random MS Office documents correctly, and LO represents decades of coder-years.

tripzilch 9y ago
Well they could probably come up with some solution perhaps using a virtual LibreOffice to import it or whatnot. We've known for ages that those formats aren't particularly "ideal" and we should be starting letting them go, regardless of dreaming about a hypothetical OS or not. I mean, you could also probably come up with some solution to have a guest over who brings their pet cow without doing too much damage to your nicely decorated apartment. Doesn't mean that's an ideal situation, and it most definitely is no reason to not dream about living somewhere nicer than a stable, and what that would look like to you. The latter part, about dreaming how NICE your house could look like if you did not have to accommodate guests with cows barging into your living room all the time. That is what the article is actually about, he's pretty clear about his awareness that technical possibility is very different from the availability of a realistic road to transition from where we are now to the possibilities he sketches. It's also a very important matter of combating learned helplessness. If you dismiss dreaming about an IdealOS beforehand because there's no way (that you can see now) to get there from where desktop OS's are today, then you most assuredly will miss the opportunity to attain even some of these improvements, were they to come within reach through some circumstance in the future. Also, I remember programming on a 386. And on the one hand it amazes me that the thing in my pocket today is so much more powerful than that old machine, let alone my current desktop. And on the other hand, it infuriates me that some tasks on my desktop today are quite slow when really they have no right to be, and some of these tasks are even things that my 386 used to have no problems with whatsoever (but then, TPX was a ridiculously fast compiler, a true gem). We should not let that slip out of sight, demand better and keep dreaming.