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Phantom – forward-thinking concept of OS that's not Linux-derived
- lioeters 7y agoThe source: https://github.com/dzavalishin/phantomuserland https://github.com/dzavalishin/phantomuserland Previous discussion (6 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672610
- Angeo34 7y ago>that's not Linux derived I get that it's supposed to be a strength but it will also be the reason it will be absolutely useless. Even BSDs implemented the Linux glue because everything is made for Linux.
- farisjarrah 7y agoEven if this is absolutely useless, there is an intrinsic value to the author to create this, to learn, and an extrinsic value to this: It may inspire some linux or BSD kernel dev to fix a long standing bug or add increased functionality.
- trasz 7y agoThe „Linux glue” in FreeBSD is just for closed source applications that can’t be rebuilt. Pretty much all the software written for Linux can be easily ported to other Unix systems, since most of the APIs are portable, and the ones that are Linux-specific are usually either useful only for system software (eg netlink) or are broken but design and nobody uses them anyway (eg signalfd(3)).
- wbl 7y agoOoh what is broken about signalfd?
- grenoire 7y agoLinus did not intend Linux to be ran on anything but his PC setup either, but here we are.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago> There is (very simple) POSIX subsystem in Phantom.
- pjmlp 7y agoChromeOS, iOS, Android and plenty of IoT MIT licensed OSes prove otherwise. We just need money and willingness to press forward no matter what challenges come into developers direction, to avoid a Linux monoculture. And no, the fact that ChromeOS and Android use Linux kernel doesn't matter, as it is hardly exposed to userspace.
- rvz 7y agoFuchsia + Zircon kernel is probably the most serious answer to being a mainstream "open-source" non-linux alternative operating system other than GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS.
- ychompinator 7y agoSo if a program causes a crash it’s state will be saved and upon next boot it will cause a crash. What could go wrong? Perhaps state is better left at the data level rather than in memory
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoProbably the thing that concerns me the most here: If it is as described... turning it off and then back on again probably won't fix whatever it's doing wrong. :/ I'm very curious what troubleshooting a system like this would look like.
- MisterTea 7y agoMost likely what happens when Windows can't restore state from sleep/suspend and you have to delete the state file and do a normal boot. Though hopefully with fine grain control over what you can nuke.
- antonvs 7y ago> hopefully with fine grain control over what you can nuke. And therein lies one of the many challenges of a system like this. It's fine as an experiment - but turning it into something usable for any serious purpose is unlikely to happen. There are much more reliable and usable ways to implement automatically persistent systems. The way databases use transaction logs is an example.
- dzavalishin 7y agoIt depends. Think of: - OO DB, like key/val storage, but with stored procedures. It's Phantom. - Smart home UI, SCADA front - lots of METAdata about widgets, windows, screens, etc - but getting all the actual data from network. It's Phantom. - Robotics. How long your self-driving car takes to reboot, fsck and restart all applications when it drives 100 mph? - Medic equipment. Please do not die for five minutes, we need to reload application. There are places that in any case need very clever and special software, would gain of fast same-state restart and need complex but more or less static configuration. Think of partial use of Phantom nature. Be it usual Unix app, but with ability to have access to pre-built complex object structure to use. One example: if you have 200 fonts on your PC, starting any appl that uses fonts is "wait half an hour till I rescan all these fonts for you". Let Phantom personality to prepare persistent font data structures and Unix personality to use them. It is really interesting even to start thinking in persistent manner. There are new worlds behind, forgive me being pathos man a bit. :)
- droobles 7y agoA nitpick, in your FAQ's it should be "in the 1960's" not "the 1960th" if I'm reading the year correctly.
- alttag 7y agoA nitpick: don't use the apostrophe in the phrase "in the 1960s". It's not a possessive in that sentence. See, e.g., https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/apostrophe.html https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/apostrophe.html
- seawlf 7y agoThis is not a hard-and-fast rule. There's hardly agreement in style guides on this note. Don't be a jerk and nitpick style on the internet; it does not add to the conversation. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apostrophe-with-a-decade-e-g-1920-s-generally-considered-incorrect https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13631/is-an-apos...
- slips 7y agoThis is largely to taste. An apostrophe doesn't always mean it's possessive, as just demonstrated, but it is also used for plural abbreviations or for numbers (like 1960's). Casual English is fairly fluid. People rarely talk exactly according to the rules of English class.
- dragonwriter 7y agoA nitpick, in your comment, it should be “FAQs” not “FAQ’s”.
- Zecc 7y agoThat's peanuts compared to the typos in "tommorow", also in the FAQ.
- MisterTea 7y agoI immediatly started singing the Spam song in my head but replaced Spam with State. Lovely State! Wonderful State! I actually prefer the old days: turn the thing off and walk away. Screw state.
- mavdi 7y agoState is the root of all evil.
- pjmlp 7y agoSome ideas seem similar to Taos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 7y ago> Your program will survive OS reboot. All variables are now.. like files? Sounds like we will have to format the hard drive and re-install everything every week or even more often.
- m463 7y agoIt might just be that programs will have to be written slightly differently. Sort of how drivers that have to deal with sleep/wake have to be tweaked. Whem machines got sleep/wake it was a definite step forward for usability (and other things like machine efficiency)
- gumby 7y agoI'm intrigued by the comments suggesting that rebooting a machine is a good way to fix problems. I certainly know that it can work but really it's a regrettable last resort to solve a problem. It would be good to have an OS that brings back the idea of persistent state. Plenty of programs have to run without stopping so require thinking of long term behavior (power plants, various spacecraft, medical implants, etc). People without stopping and in fact halting them is greatly discouraged.
- theamk 7y agoEspecially those highly critical apps absolutely depend on the the ability to recover via reboot at any moment. There could be random hardware glitches, or software crashes -- and the fix is to discard the RAM, very carefully verify the stored persistent data, and re-create the state from it. Famously, during the moon landing, the computer had an error and crashed, multiple times [1]. The landing was still a success because while the navigation state was explicitly saved, everything other state was reset. Good thing the designers did not use persistent memory! [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/ https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control...
- dzavalishin 7y agoReligions are very different around the world. Though my gods do not forbid anybody to 'very carefully verify the stored persistent data, and re-create the state from it' even if persistent data is stored in... persistent memory. Well, just kidding, I'm agnostic, there's no such thing as my gods. ;) Key point is code that 'very carefully verifies'. Forced RAM nullification on reboot does not help per se. And there's no need to reboot in any case. If you feel you're busted, in persistent env you still can clear all state and recreate it from some other state. It's just very traditional to think of files, not RAM as storage. Memory mapped files, btw, are quarter a step to Phantom.
- gumby 7y agoBack in the days of core memory I remember restarting a machine after the power had gone out. No need to reboot (unless power had gone out while the monitory ("kernel") was running) -- only the running process, with its semiconductor registers, would die. Everything else was persistent. The original Multics design did not make a distinction between memory pages on disk and in RAM. Files were just a way to describe a collection of memory pages, wherever they might be.
- theamk 7y agoThis is very interesting, but I have a lot of questions about how "keeping documents as in-memory object" works in practice -- because files gives us lots of features we depend on, without even realizing it. - Upgrade software: right now, my "txt" files are independent from "/usr/bin/emacs". I can upgrade emacs to the later version, and use it to re-open the same documents. This does not seem possible if by file is "text window + object pointer + editor code". - Move/copy files between machines -- I can copy most of the files, but not objects. I can also save older versions, send them by email or messengers, and so on. - Recover from bad software -- the other day, my computer decided it wants to have a full-screen uncloseable window. A reboot fixed this right up. Good thing it was not persistent. - Recover from crashes. What do you do if you write a presentation, and a programming error causes program to stop responding if you ever draw a green circle of certain size? In regular OS, you restart your software, load the latest savefile, and avoid green circles in the future. In PhantomOS, looks like you will be screwed. The only thing that Phantom seems to offer is snapshots, but they are pretty extreme (the whole system is reverted), and even then, it only helps with some classes of bugs, the ones which are obvious enough that you notice them right away.
- dzavalishin 7y agoActually things in Phantom are not SO different from usual world. - You can install new version of class code. Of course, app code have to do migration by hand, but that's the case in nowadays world - if you change data file format, you have to convert. - There's no problem to migrate object tree over the net. Even storing it to a file is not a problem. - Persistence does not _forbid_ to restart things. It just does not restart 'em on reboot. Eggs in your fridge are (more or less) persistent :), but you still can throw 'em away and put in fresh ones. We're living in a persistent world and do not suffer too much from it, right? Non-persistence of software world is just innatural. We're very used to it, and that's all.
- theamk 7y agoThanks for the answers, I am glad to hear from the author! - What do you mean "app code have to do migration by hand"? I'd say that most of the existing file formats need no migration -- images, videos, music basically don't change; and even very complex file formats like Microsoft doc only change with major versions, not with the minor ones -- MS word had tens of thousands code updates (service packs, localization, etc..) but only a dozen or so file formats. - What do you mean by "restart" in "Persistence does not _forbid_ to restart things."? if by "restart", you mean "kill all the threads related to object", then I don't think it will help in most cases. If you have a bug in "Draw()" function, this bug will still be there after thread restart. If by "restart", you mean "wipe all the state, and start from the clean slate", then won't this destroy all the documents user made? --- We live in persistent world, and we do suffer a lot from it, we are just very used to it. I have to wash my dishes every day, buy new clothes, and repair my car. I would love to be able to "save" the make, model, and license plate # of my car, then "restart" it to get a brand-new car with the same properties. Default persistence of everything is annoying, and moving it to software is just unnatural :)
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agodoes it run doom?
- 0xdead 7y agoA "forward-thinking" project shouldn't have been written in C. They should've used Rust.
- dzavalishin 7y agoYou're quite right, Rust would be better tool. But first Phantom code was written some 15 years ago and now it's too late to switch. :)
- dzavalishin 7y agoHi everybody. As the author of original Phantom OS idea I'd like to thank you for the discussion. I am here to answer any question, please ask. If you have some collaboration or experiment with Phantom in mind, I'll be happy to discuss. I'm looking for practical but simple use case for Phantom OS.
- dzavalishin 7y agoBeing on the vacations I decided to write some Phantom OS internals book, and if you're interested, here it is: https://phantomdox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://phantomdox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/