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Though history seems to prove him wrong, Tanenbaum wasn't incorrect. Linux to me is an example of the wrong thing at the right time. Linux embracing Posix and

Though history seems to prove him wrong, Tanenbaum wasn't incorrect. Linux to me is an example of the wrong thing at the right time. Linux embracing Posix and fully supporting Intel gave programmers exactly what they wanted right at the nascency of the dotcom boom. Apache, MySQL and PHP needed a home that wasn't Windows ... and Linux provided that home on the best dollar-for-dollar processors on the planet. If Motorola or IBM had challenged Intel with cheap, better processors then history might have looked different because Linux wouldn't have been a solution on those platforms. Linux works well enough I suppose, but the fact that we have this gigantic mess, where we run an OS, and then run a hypervisor on it, and then run more copies of an OS, and then finally get to run our application code, tells me something is quite wrong. The fact that unikernels are even a thing tells me that people DO feel the pain of monokernels and yearn for something simpler. Securing a monokernel like Linux, even one so open and scrutinized, is really, really hard. There is just so much surface area in the kernel to attack. Everything is so heavyweight. I think Tannenbaum was right, but he just wasn't enough of a hacker to get things done in time to catch the wave that the dotcom boom created. To me the dream would be something like Google's new Fuschia OS where everything is capability-based so security is built into the OS concept from the very beginning.

magduf 8y ago
You're leaving out the other big new trend of today, which is containers like Docker where now people like to run applications from within. You're right, something is quite wrong, but Minix isn't the answer either, as it doesn't provide the isolation that containers and VMs do.
- nickik 8y ago
  I think the point of containers is to make the exact needs of your environment configurable and runable in many different context. That concept is very valuable and in the future this configuration might compiled to a unikernel that runs directly on the hyperwiser. Or maybe in a process on a microkernel OS that runs isolated processes.
  - makapuf 8y ago
    For that, chroots (schroot) and tar.gz are almost sufficient.
  - devonkim 8y ago
    Containers that just do resource allocation and minimal isolation (masquerading as configuration management somehow) are neglecting the power of strong network and storage layers over BSD Jails (although still maybe up to par with Solaris zones only recently?) that made them indispensable for systems administration at high velocity and scale. The fact we can use pluggable SDN stacks or different filesystem drivers like ZFS and LVM instead of bare bones overlayfs is important for an ecosystem. In contrast, VMware with its multi-year cycles to release pluggable storage and network that was only available to a few already-entrenched vendors stifled progress under the vSphere ecosystem. I knew it was over for VMware when most of the large-scale customers were simply running containers in ESXi or if they were on OpenStack they did the same thing with an additional layer. With productive organizations, the needs of application developers always supersedes the needs of those managing the applications in production barring something non-negotiable like security / regulations.
Gibbon1 8y ago
I don't do web stuff much at all. But when I think about it from a embedded view point what people do seems all wrong. You almost want the ability to fire off a thread in a language that just does immutable stack allocation. It's a hard constraint, but it'd be fast and easy to debug. Get rid of mutable data, get rid of persistent state and heap allocation.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "Get rid of mutable data" doesn't play well in embedded (at least for many applications). I have worked on an embedded system where the essence of the problem itself was one giant shared mutable state. (It was a video router for television stations.)
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    I spend a lot of time trying to contain state in event driven software with callbacks, it's a big hassle. My thought was that there are other cases where you are really just doing batch processing blocks of data and then performing some action. And not holding state internally between runs. That's the usage case. Thought was if you don't have neither mutable data and don't reuse stack frames. You can see exactly what happened if something goes wrong. And avoiding the heap means it's fast and deterministic.
nickik 8y ago
What is more interesting is that while Linux might be a mess, so is everything else. Neither apple nor Microsoft or IBM managed to put something significantly better out-there at a price that was worth it. One could consider OpenSolaris as something that could have filled that space in alternative future. Check out Redox OS, it has many cool concept and is written in Rust.
- __sr__ 8y ago
  In many ways Windows is better designed than Linux - although it has its own problems to weigh it down.
  - anfilt 8y ago
    Windows has a lot different designs. You can tell when certain API for instance were introduced by how they are structured. The design of the internals is not as clear. It's not open source.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  so is everything else. Amen to that. Nature's biological organisms grow slowly, as does real knowledge. Poor nutritional choices lead to poor health. Natural ecology has adapted over 4 billion years. Hasty applications are wasty.
  - dekhn 8y ago
    Many of the most successful organisms are bacteria that grow it incredibly High rates and mutate and evolve quickly
taeric 8y ago
I don't know. This seems more like post-rationalization than it does anything else. Note that nobody is calling Tanenbaum dumb or unintelligent. I think even Linus still highly respects his work. However, the claim that micro-kernels will be the future has been a near omnipresent claim for a long time now. It is interesting to think that they would be easier to secure. I'm not convinced we have any evidence of that. Best evidence we have, is if you are willing to cutoff your past support, you can secure your future more easily. Supporting the past, though, has been a constant requirement of Linux the kernel. So, I wish the Fuschia folks well, but it is hard not to be doubtful on that front.
gowld 8y ago
"Worse is better" meets "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook." Linus was better being "wrong" for 25 years than Tanenbaum and GNU Hurd was being "right" but never shipping anything of non-toy importance.
- overkalix 8y ago
  I always liked the aphorism "Better is the enemy us good".
  - acqq 8y ago
    "Perfect is the enemy of good (enough)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
- davidgould 8y ago
  My favorite take on the old saw is "If my auntie had three axles she'd be a semi-truck tractor".
Const-me 8y ago
> and Linux provided that home on the best dollar-for-dollar processors on the planet. FreeBSD was very competitive. They both were launched around the same time, first version of Linux released in 1991, 386BSD in 1992. They share a lot of features, i386 target, posix compatibility. BSD pioneered some very important technologies, kqueue (epoll was couple years later in Linux), jail (docker was a decade later), etc. I still don’t understand why everyone uses Linux now, but BSD only stayed in very niche markets.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  BSD was subject to legal uncertainty at the time due to its relationship with Unix. By the time those uncertainties were resolved, Linux already had momentum.
- wink 8y ago
  What timeframe are we talking about here? Maybe I'm late to the party, but even for "special interest" Linux in the late 90s was already kind of well-known compared to the BSDs. (I was in school back then, no internet, and only learned about Linux from some folks already studying computer science). And I'm just using that point of data because when I came in contact with Linux there wasn't really much about FreeBSD, so either that was my bubble or it was technically competitive but had already lost the popularity contest.
  - Const-me 8y ago
    > it was technically competitive but had already lost the popularity contest. I think that’s the case. It never gained traction outside of niche markets. Most ISPs in late 90s were running a lot of BSD-based servers, companies like Apple, Juniper, Sony, Nintendo are still using BSD kernel and/or other components in their products, but it was and still is relatively little-known OS. I can’t say I’m happy about that. I’m currently working on an embedded Linux-based firmware, I’d gladly switched to BSD. Maybe it’s just my irrational fears but I feel BSD is more reliable. However, that would require too much work to accomplish. I need stable and reliable GPU and WiFi drivers; hardware vendors (ARM and Realtek, respectively) only ship drivers for Linux, and I don’t think I’m competent in that area to attempt to port them, I never did substantial work on Linux nor BSD device drivers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
__sr__ 8y ago
Agreed. In addition to the factors you outlined, another reason behind the success of Linux in enterprise is Java. Java essentiallly enables people to ignore the OS altogether. So in essence, Linux becomes a dumb platform which can, in theory, be replaced anything else as long as it supports Java. Android is the same story. It may have Linux underpinnings, but that is out of convenience, not necessity. It has no bearing on the actual applications. Google could replace it with something else (Fuschia if it succeeds, or anything else like BSD, or technically, even Windows) any day with almost no effect.
mchahn 8y ago
> Linux wouldn't have been a solution on those platforms And why is that? It takes a while for the most popular hardware to change and linux could easily track it.
Upvoter33 8y ago
security is indeed hard. however, people building microkernels at that time were not doing it for security reasons, and it is not clear that the types of microkernels they built (e.g., mach, with a huge unix "personality") had any better security properties than typical kernels. So I think it's a bit generous to look back and say "yeah tannenbaum wasn't incorrect". the hypervisor part of your argument is more reasonable - the amount of virtualization on a machine these days seems excessive, with each level solving a different problem, and a cleaner solution waiting to burst forth. I suspect, however, with new containerization and other isolation technologies, that we'll come to an answer soon enough, and Linux will still be there underneath, monolithic and all.

magduf 8y ago

You're leaving out the other big new trend of today, which is containers like Docker where now people like to run applications from within. You're right, something is quite wrong, but Minix isn't the answer either, as it doesn't provide the isolation that containers and VMs do.

nickik 8y ago
I think the point of containers is to make the exact needs of your environment configurable and runable in many different context. That concept is very valuable and in the future this configuration might compiled to a unikernel that runs directly on the hyperwiser. Or maybe in a process on a microkernel OS that runs isolated processes.
- makapuf 8y ago
  For that, chroots (schroot) and tar.gz are almost sufficient.
- devonkim 8y ago
  Containers that just do resource allocation and minimal isolation (masquerading as configuration management somehow) are neglecting the power of strong network and storage layers over BSD Jails (although still maybe up to par with Solaris zones only recently?) that made them indispensable for systems administration at high velocity and scale. The fact we can use pluggable SDN stacks or different filesystem drivers like ZFS and LVM instead of bare bones overlayfs is important for an ecosystem. In contrast, VMware with its multi-year cycles to release pluggable storage and network that was only available to a few already-entrenched vendors stifled progress under the vSphere ecosystem. I knew it was over for VMware when most of the large-scale customers were simply running containers in ESXi or if they were on OpenStack they did the same thing with an additional layer. With productive organizations, the needs of application developers always supersedes the needs of those managing the applications in production barring something non-negotiable like security / regulations.

Gibbon1 8y ago

I don't do web stuff much at all. But when I think about it from a embedded view point what people do seems all wrong. You almost want the ability to fire off a thread in a language that just does immutable stack allocation. It's a hard constraint, but it'd be fast and easy to debug. Get rid of mutable data, get rid of persistent state and heap allocation.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
"Get rid of mutable data" doesn't play well in embedded (at least for many applications). I have worked on an embedded system where the essence of the problem itself was one giant shared mutable state. (It was a video router for television stations.)
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  I spend a lot of time trying to contain state in event driven software with callbacks, it's a big hassle. My thought was that there are other cases where you are really just doing batch processing blocks of data and then performing some action. And not holding state internally between runs. That's the usage case. Thought was if you don't have neither mutable data and don't reuse stack frames. You can see exactly what happened if something goes wrong. And avoiding the heap means it's fast and deterministic.

nickik 8y ago

What is more interesting is that while Linux might be a mess, so is everything else. Neither apple nor Microsoft or IBM managed to put something significantly better out-there at a price that was worth it. One could consider OpenSolaris as something that could have filled that space in alternative future. Check out Redox OS, it has many cool concept and is written in Rust.

__sr__ 8y ago
In many ways Windows is better designed than Linux - although it has its own problems to weigh it down.
- anfilt 8y ago
  Windows has a lot different designs. You can tell when certain API for instance were introduced by how they are structured. The design of the internals is not as clear. It's not open source.
8bitsrule 8y ago
so is everything else. Amen to that. Nature's biological organisms grow slowly, as does real knowledge. Poor nutritional choices lead to poor health. Natural ecology has adapted over 4 billion years. Hasty applications are wasty.
- dekhn 8y ago
  Many of the most successful organisms are bacteria that grow it incredibly High rates and mutate and evolve quickly

taeric 8y ago

I don't know. This seems more like post-rationalization than it does anything else. Note that nobody is calling Tanenbaum dumb or unintelligent. I think even Linus still highly respects his work. However, the claim that micro-kernels will be the future has been a near omnipresent claim for a long time now. It is interesting to think that they would be easier to secure. I'm not convinced we have any evidence of that. Best evidence we have, is if you are willing to cutoff your past support, you can secure your future more easily. Supporting the past, though, has been a constant requirement of Linux the kernel. So, I wish the Fuschia folks well, but it is hard not to be doubtful on that front.

gowld 8y ago

"Worse is better" meets "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook." Linus was better being "wrong" for 25 years than Tanenbaum and GNU Hurd was being "right" but never shipping anything of non-toy importance.

overkalix 8y ago
I always liked the aphorism "Better is the enemy us good".
- acqq 8y ago
  "Perfect is the enemy of good (enough)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
davidgould 8y ago
My favorite take on the old saw is "If my auntie had three axles she'd be a semi-truck tractor".

Const-me 8y ago

> and Linux provided that home on the best dollar-for-dollar processors on the planet. FreeBSD was very competitive. They both were launched around the same time, first version of Linux released in 1991, 386BSD in 1992. They share a lot of features, i386 target, posix compatibility. BSD pioneered some very important technologies, kqueue (epoll was couple years later in Linux), jail (docker was a decade later), etc. I still don’t understand why everyone uses Linux now, but BSD only stayed in very niche markets.

yellowapple 8y ago
BSD was subject to legal uncertainty at the time due to its relationship with Unix. By the time those uncertainties were resolved, Linux already had momentum.
wink 8y ago
What timeframe are we talking about here? Maybe I'm late to the party, but even for "special interest" Linux in the late 90s was already kind of well-known compared to the BSDs. (I was in school back then, no internet, and only learned about Linux from some folks already studying computer science). And I'm just using that point of data because when I came in contact with Linux there wasn't really much about FreeBSD, so either that was my bubble or it was technically competitive but had already lost the popularity contest.
- Const-me 8y ago
  > it was technically competitive but had already lost the popularity contest. I think that’s the case. It never gained traction outside of niche markets. Most ISPs in late 90s were running a lot of BSD-based servers, companies like Apple, Juniper, Sony, Nintendo are still using BSD kernel and/or other components in their products, but it was and still is relatively little-known OS. I can’t say I’m happy about that. I’m currently working on an embedded Linux-based firmware, I’d gladly switched to BSD. Maybe it’s just my irrational fears but I feel BSD is more reliable. However, that would require too much work to accomplish. I need stable and reliable GPU and WiFi drivers; hardware vendors (ARM and Realtek, respectively) only ship drivers for Linux, and I don’t think I’m competent in that area to attempt to port them, I never did substantial work on Linux nor BSD device drivers.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

__sr__ 8y ago

Agreed. In addition to the factors you outlined, another reason behind the success of Linux in enterprise is Java. Java essentiallly enables people to ignore the OS altogether. So in essence, Linux becomes a dumb platform which can, in theory, be replaced anything else as long as it supports Java. Android is the same story. It may have Linux underpinnings, but that is out of convenience, not necessity. It has no bearing on the actual applications. Google could replace it with something else (Fuschia if it succeeds, or anything else like BSD, or technically, even Windows) any day with almost no effect.

mchahn 8y ago

> Linux wouldn't have been a solution on those platforms And why is that? It takes a while for the most popular hardware to change and linux could easily track it.

Upvoter33 8y ago

security is indeed hard. however, people building microkernels at that time were not doing it for security reasons, and it is not clear that the types of microkernels they built (e.g., mach, with a huge unix "personality") had any better security properties than typical kernels. So I think it's a bit generous to look back and say "yeah tannenbaum wasn't incorrect". the hypervisor part of your argument is more reasonable - the amount of virtualization on a machine these days seems excessive, with each level solving a different problem, and a cleaner solution waiting to burst forth. I suspect, however, with new containerization and other isolation technologies, that we'll come to an answer soon enough, and Linux will still be there underneath, monolithic and all.