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This is still false. As a concrete example, see the timeline for MacOS ASLR rollout. The fact that you think things like Haiku or Redox are revolutionary and yo

This is still false. As a concrete example, see the timeline for MacOS ASLR rollout. The fact that you think things like Haiku or Redox are revolutionary and you aren't talking about kernel locking schemes, file systems, protection against control flow redirection or really any subject area that is considered part of active OS research makes me think that the reason you don't think big companies are working on OS's is because you aren't actually interested in OS research. Which is fine, there's no reason you should be. But it means you're barking up the wrong tree.

zadkey 7y ago
Again, I wasn't saying there aren't innovations. But I would argue that for a company like Apple, their next iPhone release takes priority and will get a significantly larger allocation of their resources than the next OS level feature.
- hailwren 7y ago
  Yes, I agree Apple spends much more on iPhone development than OS research. However, I'd be willing to bet that they pay their OS devs more. Further, the reason Apple gets to spend less on OS research is that everyone is working on OS research. OS research is at every institution and everyone benefits from OS advances (like ASLR from earlier or NX bits). Further, academic institutions are actively involved in OS research in a way that they aren't involved in helping Apple produce the next iPhone. So, sure -- Apple isn't investing as much, but they are keeping their OS modern and there isn't some corporate conspiracy (or even competitive opportunity) to keep users away from having Rust in the kernel. Overall, I think OS research is probably at a more interesting point in history than mobile hardware. There really is amazing competition happening between Linux/macOS/Windows and the users are getting those benefits. Research into secure computation and encryption is being integrated at the hardware level, security research is delving into lots of interesting problems w.r.t. badly behaving programs and also programs that behave correctly but attempt to perform malicious actions (i.e. buffer overflows vs keyloggers), and as lame as it sounds Linux's massive kernel improvements (I'm thinking specifically about their work on mutexes) have allowed them to become one of the quickest OS's in history. It also brushes up against the question of what we're even calling OS research. The secure enclave was an iPhone first piece of hardware, but its concepts, development, and execution were certainly done by people who I would call OS researchers.

zadkey 7y ago

Again, I wasn't saying there aren't innovations. But I would argue that for a company like Apple, their next iPhone release takes priority and will get a significantly larger allocation of their resources than the next OS level feature.

hailwren 7y ago
Yes, I agree Apple spends much more on iPhone development than OS research. However, I'd be willing to bet that they pay their OS devs more. Further, the reason Apple gets to spend less on OS research is that everyone is working on OS research. OS research is at every institution and everyone benefits from OS advances (like ASLR from earlier or NX bits). Further, academic institutions are actively involved in OS research in a way that they aren't involved in helping Apple produce the next iPhone. So, sure -- Apple isn't investing as much, but they are keeping their OS modern and there isn't some corporate conspiracy (or even competitive opportunity) to keep users away from having Rust in the kernel. Overall, I think OS research is probably at a more interesting point in history than mobile hardware. There really is amazing competition happening between Linux/macOS/Windows and the users are getting those benefits. Research into secure computation and encryption is being integrated at the hardware level, security research is delving into lots of interesting problems w.r.t. badly behaving programs and also programs that behave correctly but attempt to perform malicious actions (i.e. buffer overflows vs keyloggers), and as lame as it sounds Linux's massive kernel improvements (I'm thinking specifically about their work on mutexes) have allowed them to become one of the quickest OS's in history. It also brushes up against the question of what we're even calling OS research. The secure enclave was an iPhone first piece of hardware, but its concepts, development, and execution were certainly done by people who I would call OS researchers.