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It's not clear what is the main problem this talk/slides want to solve. There's a lot of research and advancement in the things that matter: - Rust is showing

It's not clear what is the main problem this talk/slides want to solve. There's a lot of research and advancement in the things that matter: - Rust is showing how linear types can get a nice balance between safe systems and great resource usage. - GPUs and TPUs are the next-gen somewhat general purpuse computer hardware, but none of them came from operating systems research - containers partially solve the resource sharing problem, though Plan 9 what the author refers to is probably a better system design for containers. At the same time there's a huge pressure at the big companies to improve resource sharing (like the performance and UX of lambda functions) while minimizing the side channel vulnerabilities, so I don't think there's no money put into it (this is a multi-billion dollar problem for these companies, and the CEOs know it, as they have to keep building the datacenters). These are just a few examples from all the advancements that were happening, I don't see any reason why universities would do so much better than companies.

cryptonector 8y ago
Even at that time (2000), Sun was already working on -or soon would be- all of these and other things that have enormous impact on the industry: - ZFS - DTrace - SMF (think systemd done right, though SMF has its issues) - FMA I remember Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and others at Sun screaming up and down that there was a ton of innovation left to do in operating systems. They were absolutely right. In some sense, ZFS and DTrace were applications of old ideas, but boy were they done well. ZFS is BSD4.4's log-structured filesystem done right and better. DTrace is applying the dictum from database land of aggregating statistics as close to the source as possible. They could just have been papers, I guess, but they chose to make an impact by writing code. Why write papers first then code when you can write code first and papers later? Academia mostly only pays for papers, so you don't get that much code out of academia. The private sector mostly only pays for code, so you don't get that many papers out of the private sector.
peterwwillis 8y ago
> It's not clear what is the main problem this talk/slides want to solve. Basically, Linux's design sucks, and the products that surround it suck. Except for a tiny few applications, nearly all of the industry for the past 18 years has gotten almost nothing innovative adopted by the majority of the industry. Oh, well, containers, a combination of package manager and resource isolation. But that basically already existed as jails/zones, just without the package manager and remote backend. And microservice orchestrators, those are new, and useful. But neither of those make a dent in the laptops and mobile devices which the majority of the planet uses. Just as one comparison, it's been 27 years since Plan 9 was first released, and we still don't have most of its incredibly useful, novel features in any operating system. We're actually poorly re-inventing distributed operating systems, but as incompatible, over-designed, kludgy distributed applications.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Well, if "Linux's [non-]design sucks" is the problem, there is no solution. The Linux community is simply not interested in design, design reviews, reviewing interface designs, and so on. They are not setup for it and don't want to be. They are only interested in code. So you get things like epoll. On the other hand, Linux won. Maybe because of this, or maybe in spite of this.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  I agree that Linux' design sucks, but I don't agree in the operating system taking the role of distributed computing. Distributed computing is really hard because all applications are efficient with different computing/storage models. You can look at Redis, BigTable, PostgreSQL, TensorFlow, MapReduce just as an example. There's no reason why you couldn't do deep learning on top of any of them (they are all generic enough to execute the algorithms), but you can easily have a 100000x speed in execution speed, in which case being compatible doesn't have any advantage.

cryptonector 8y ago

Even at that time (2000), Sun was already working on -or soon would be- all of these and other things that have enormous impact on the industry: - ZFS - DTrace - SMF (think systemd done right, though SMF has its issues) - FMA I remember Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and others at Sun screaming up and down that there was a ton of innovation left to do in operating systems. They were absolutely right. In some sense, ZFS and DTrace were applications of old ideas, but boy were they done well. ZFS is BSD4.4's log-structured filesystem done right and better. DTrace is applying the dictum from database land of aggregating statistics as close to the source as possible. They could just have been papers, I guess, but they chose to make an impact by writing code. Why write papers first then code when you can write code first and papers later? Academia mostly only pays for papers, so you don't get that much code out of academia. The private sector mostly only pays for code, so you don't get that many papers out of the private sector.

peterwwillis 8y ago

> It's not clear what is the main problem this talk/slides want to solve. Basically, Linux's design sucks, and the products that surround it suck. Except for a tiny few applications, nearly all of the industry for the past 18 years has gotten almost nothing innovative adopted by the majority of the industry. Oh, well, containers, a combination of package manager and resource isolation. But that basically already existed as jails/zones, just without the package manager and remote backend. And microservice orchestrators, those are new, and useful. But neither of those make a dent in the laptops and mobile devices which the majority of the planet uses. Just as one comparison, it's been 27 years since Plan 9 was first released, and we still don't have most of its incredibly useful, novel features in any operating system. We're actually poorly re-inventing distributed operating systems, but as incompatible, over-designed, kludgy distributed applications.

cryptonector 8y ago
Well, if "Linux's [non-]design sucks" is the problem, there is no solution. The Linux community is simply not interested in design, design reviews, reviewing interface designs, and so on. They are not setup for it and don't want to be. They are only interested in code. So you get things like epoll. On the other hand, Linux won. Maybe because of this, or maybe in spite of this.
xiphias2 8y ago
I agree that Linux' design sucks, but I don't agree in the operating system taking the role of distributed computing. Distributed computing is really hard because all applications are efficient with different computing/storage models. You can look at Redis, BigTable, PostgreSQL, TensorFlow, MapReduce just as an example. There's no reason why you couldn't do deep learning on top of any of them (they are all generic enough to execute the algorithms), but you can easily have a 100000x speed in execution speed, in which case being compatible doesn't have any advantage.