6 ms·

I'd really like to some new OS efforts to go along with new chips. Does it really have to be *nix on everything?

pjc50 8y ago
If it can't run a browser, adoption is going to be crippled, and porting a browser to a new OS is a much bigger project than writing your own OS.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Or, in general, getting code to run on it at all. Almost every OS that hasn’t offered C (and arguably some sort of POSIX) has floundered without gaining traction.
  - ken 8y ago
    Almost every OS that has offered C and POSIX has floundered without getting traction, too. The number of operating systems that have succeeded in any real way is tiny, and probably not big enough to draw any conclusions from. None of the major players today got to where they are now by following the conventional wisdom of their day. I assume the next big OS (or three) will similarly succeed by breaking all the rules we thought we knew.
- mcbain 8y ago
  These chips aren’t going to be running browsers in the near future, unless you mean in a TV (one of the last places you could find MIPS). The market they are headed for is embedded, where every cent of the BOM counts. Licensing costs can add up surprisingly fast as part of that. Server parts are a big step above that - MIPS used to play there, but after a short peak they failed many times over. It tried in the networking and embedded space for a while, but then had its lunch stolen by all the cheap ARM vendors from below, and stomped on by x86 from above. And then desktop/laptop parts? Unless you are Apple (and even then), pushing a new arch on the desktop is a massive, expensive task, and I can’t see it being worthwhile.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    >> The market they are headed for is embedded... Are you sure? RISC-V is about to explode in the embedded space. I always ask our suppliers about their RISC-V plans and it's shifted over the last 3 years. They've gone from "what's that?" to the point where they are all aware, some are hedging, and some are going full tilt but not quite at the stage of "here are our offerings". Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind.
    - snaky 8y ago
      > Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind. RISC-V user?
- monocasa 8y ago
  Webkit is pretty portable.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Such defeatism is why we have to put up with clunky 50 year old abstractions and the over-complicated "ecosystem" of webshit we built on top of them.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    (firstly, this is kind of off topic, since OS design is usually orthogonal to processor architecture, unless you've got something really funky going on) Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. There have been plenty of minority, research, or experimental operating systems over the past few decades. Hardly any of them persisted, because it's a very Darwinian winner-take-all market.
    - pdimitar 8y ago
      > Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. IMO this is bit of a "the chicken or the egg came first?" problem. The industry had a lot of needs in terms of computing when computers started becoming physically small. The very first few things -- OS, any tech paradigmae, chip designs, shell architecture and what-have-you -- that seemed to do the job good enough got 99.9% of investments and mindshare and thus even if everything we currently use is ugly and barely working, there's no economic interest to revisit the other competing standards from the dawn of computing and see if there are golden geese hidden in there somewhere. So when a carpenter tells you "I need a natural wood and screws because that's what works best" you really should be reading that as: "nobody tried to invent better materials and joinery techniques or tooling so I'll stick to what I know". "Good enough" is not a slogan to follow.
      - snazz 8y ago
        I really want to see an introspective, single-user, programming-centric, graphical operating system that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. A new ISA seems like a great opportunity to ditch the current models of computing for something more Genera-esque, since we now can produce commodity hardware that is powerful enough to achieve good performance at reasonable prices.
TickleSteve 8y ago
Not everything requires a browser... The main use-case for these devices is in embedded-applications, for which there are many other operating systems (FreeRTOS and the like). What you're not going to find is any real desktop-OS support (other than Linux). Its been a while since MIPS had any presence on the desktop. (i.e SGI).
- trasz 8y ago
  FWIW, FreeBSD runs on MIPS just fine.
glenrivard 8y ago
Suspect we will with Zircon and Fuchsia. We have from with Google. "Google Poaches Top Mobile Chip Designer John Bruno From Apple" https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/23/google-poaches-mobile-chip-designer-from-apple/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/23/google-poaches-mobile-c... "Google reportedly poaches Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia engineers for 'gChips' team" https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3070877/google--poaches-intel-qualcomm-and-nvidia-engineers https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3070877/google--po... "Google Said to Be On a Chip Engineer Hiring Spree in India" https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-said-be-chip-engineer-hiring-spree-india https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-s... There is obvious design decisions you would make for Zircon versus Linux. The two kernels are radically different.
convolvatron 8y ago
there's not that much OS dependence on chips unless you want to build it on segments and/or capabilities...there are viable ways to fake those. maybe if there were a novel form of parallelism? i agree with you that we can do better, but as other people have commented, that wound is pretty much healed over. integrated distributed management, process migration, and radically simplified OS state might put some devops people out of a job..but the industry doesnt like to take hops that large. the configuration and deployment hodgepodge is 'good enough' did you have some specific ideas you think would be interested enough to drive adoption?
- imtringued 8y ago
  Isn't that basically what kubernetes is supposed to solve? I will admit my attempts to use it have been unsuccessful but the point still stands: There is no need for a completely new operating system.
  - convolvatron 8y ago
    we totally agree. i think things could be alot better. but even though I have alot of big ideas nothing seems to justify someone adopting such a thing. even completely ignoring the cost of building and testing it. maybe some foundational advance in real security. better abstractions and performance aren't enough.
- growlist 8y ago
  No ideas in particular, I just fondly remember for example the responsiveness of the Amiga - PCs still don't seem to be as solid clock-wise, and when you get into running apps in a browser it seems like the multiple layers of abstraction are really obvious. And that's just on a desktop - Android is even worse! A pretty horrible laggy UI, and once you get into the horrific disaster that is Android development the underlying cause kind of reveals itself. Imagine the tightness of a mobile OS running close to the metal and how responsive that device could feel. You used to be able to switch on a device and the OS would immediately be there - indeed embedded devices are often still like this. Perhaps I'm just being too nostalgic though, and I realise Amiga OS was missing essential things like memory protection etc. that we now take for granted.
rootbear 8y ago
It would be nice if the owners of IRIX (whomever that is now) would release it as open source, so we could run it on our open source MIPS system. I miss my old Octane.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Yikes. HPE owns it all now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International
aidenn0 8y ago
http://metamodular.com/lispos.pdf http://metamodular.com/lispos.pdf

If it can't run a browser, adoption is going to be crippled, and porting a browser to a new OS is a much bigger project than writing your own OS.

saagarjha 8y ago
Or, in general, getting code to run on it at all. Almost every OS that hasn’t offered C (and arguably some sort of POSIX) has floundered without gaining traction.
- ken 8y ago
  Almost every OS that has offered C and POSIX has floundered without getting traction, too. The number of operating systems that have succeeded in any real way is tiny, and probably not big enough to draw any conclusions from. None of the major players today got to where they are now by following the conventional wisdom of their day. I assume the next big OS (or three) will similarly succeed by breaking all the rules we thought we knew.
mcbain 8y ago
These chips aren’t going to be running browsers in the near future, unless you mean in a TV (one of the last places you could find MIPS). The market they are headed for is embedded, where every cent of the BOM counts. Licensing costs can add up surprisingly fast as part of that. Server parts are a big step above that - MIPS used to play there, but after a short peak they failed many times over. It tried in the networking and embedded space for a while, but then had its lunch stolen by all the cheap ARM vendors from below, and stomped on by x86 from above. And then desktop/laptop parts? Unless you are Apple (and even then), pushing a new arch on the desktop is a massive, expensive task, and I can’t see it being worthwhile.
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> The market they are headed for is embedded... Are you sure? RISC-V is about to explode in the embedded space. I always ask our suppliers about their RISC-V plans and it's shifted over the last 3 years. They've gone from "what's that?" to the point where they are all aware, some are hedging, and some are going full tilt but not quite at the stage of "here are our offerings". Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind.
  - snaky 8y ago
    > Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind. RISC-V user?
monocasa 8y ago
Webkit is pretty portable.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Such defeatism is why we have to put up with clunky 50 year old abstractions and the over-complicated "ecosystem" of webshit we built on top of them.
- pjc50 8y ago
  (firstly, this is kind of off topic, since OS design is usually orthogonal to processor architecture, unless you've got something really funky going on) Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. There have been plenty of minority, research, or experimental operating systems over the past few decades. Hardly any of them persisted, because it's a very Darwinian winner-take-all market.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    > Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. IMO this is bit of a "the chicken or the egg came first?" problem. The industry had a lot of needs in terms of computing when computers started becoming physically small. The very first few things -- OS, any tech paradigmae, chip designs, shell architecture and what-have-you -- that seemed to do the job good enough got 99.9% of investments and mindshare and thus even if everything we currently use is ugly and barely working, there's no economic interest to revisit the other competing standards from the dawn of computing and see if there are golden geese hidden in there somewhere. So when a carpenter tells you "I need a natural wood and screws because that's what works best" you really should be reading that as: "nobody tried to invent better materials and joinery techniques or tooling so I'll stick to what I know". "Good enough" is not a slogan to follow.
    - snazz 8y ago
      I really want to see an introspective, single-user, programming-centric, graphical operating system that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. A new ISA seems like a great opportunity to ditch the current models of computing for something more Genera-esque, since we now can produce commodity hardware that is powerful enough to achieve good performance at reasonable prices.

TickleSteve 8y ago

Not everything requires a browser... The main use-case for these devices is in embedded-applications, for which there are many other operating systems (FreeRTOS and the like). What you're not going to find is any real desktop-OS support (other than Linux). Its been a while since MIPS had any presence on the desktop. (i.e SGI).

trasz 8y ago
FWIW, FreeBSD runs on MIPS just fine.

glenrivard 8y ago

Suspect we will with Zircon and Fuchsia. We have from with Google. "Google Poaches Top Mobile Chip Designer John Bruno From Apple" https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/23/google-poaches-mobile-chip-designer-from-apple/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/23/google-poaches-mobile-c... "Google reportedly poaches Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia engineers for 'gChips' team" https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3070877/google--poaches-intel-qualcomm-and-nvidia-engineers https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3070877/google--po... "Google Said to Be On a Chip Engineer Hiring Spree in India" https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-said-be-chip-engineer-hiring-spree-india https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-s... There is obvious design decisions you would make for Zircon versus Linux. The two kernels are radically different.

convolvatron 8y ago

there's not that much OS dependence on chips unless you want to build it on segments and/or capabilities...there are viable ways to fake those. maybe if there were a novel form of parallelism? i agree with you that we can do better, but as other people have commented, that wound is pretty much healed over. integrated distributed management, process migration, and radically simplified OS state might put some devops people out of a job..but the industry doesnt like to take hops that large. the configuration and deployment hodgepodge is 'good enough' did you have some specific ideas you think would be interested enough to drive adoption?

imtringued 8y ago
Isn't that basically what kubernetes is supposed to solve? I will admit my attempts to use it have been unsuccessful but the point still stands: There is no need for a completely new operating system.
- convolvatron 8y ago
  we totally agree. i think things could be alot better. but even though I have alot of big ideas nothing seems to justify someone adopting such a thing. even completely ignoring the cost of building and testing it. maybe some foundational advance in real security. better abstractions and performance aren't enough.
growlist 8y ago
No ideas in particular, I just fondly remember for example the responsiveness of the Amiga - PCs still don't seem to be as solid clock-wise, and when you get into running apps in a browser it seems like the multiple layers of abstraction are really obvious. And that's just on a desktop - Android is even worse! A pretty horrible laggy UI, and once you get into the horrific disaster that is Android development the underlying cause kind of reveals itself. Imagine the tightness of a mobile OS running close to the metal and how responsive that device could feel. You used to be able to switch on a device and the OS would immediately be there - indeed embedded devices are often still like this. Perhaps I'm just being too nostalgic though, and I realise Amiga OS was missing essential things like memory protection etc. that we now take for granted.

rootbear 8y ago

It would be nice if the owners of IRIX (whomever that is now) would release it as open source, so we could run it on our open source MIPS system. I miss my old Octane.

lallysingh 8y ago
Yikes. HPE owns it all now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics_International

aidenn0 8y ago

http://metamodular.com/lispos.pdf http://metamodular.com/lispos.pdf