4 ms·

I'm not sure this actually solves the real problem that people have. Sure, reboots are annoying and pretty much all current OSes could be improved in this regar

I'm not sure this actually solves the real problem that people have. Sure, reboots are annoying and pretty much all current OSes could be improved in this regard. Back in the 90s, it's interesting that SunOS supported live kernel upgrades, so at the same time the kernel on disk was updated, the running system was also patched so it would act the same way as-if rebooted, but without any disruption to the live system. However, in the current days where rebooting is seen as normal for an OS upgrade, but most of the time people just put their computer to sleep, the main problem is that all the network interfaces are effectively useless when the system wakes up because most connections will have long since timed out due to lack of connection acknowledgement packets. In such a case, systems will have to tear-down and re-create a lot of state anyway. The actual issue this seems to solve, that of saving memory state and restoring again, is already solved for most use cases except OS upgrades by using sleep mode. But the hard case about network connections is still unsolved for this system, and by solving the problems it does solve with yet another VM-based environment it'll probably be doomed to obscurity unless common existing applications and virtual machines can easily be made to run on-top of it.

josephg 5y ago
> all the network interfaces are effectively useless when the system wakes up This is - and probably always will be a problem with networked software. You should program as if TCP connections could drop at any time, for any reason. Browser tabs get backgrounded. Laptops go to sleep. Cell phones roam, and go into tunnels. Servers have temporary net splits. Most high level tasks can be retried safely. Nonces and things can be used to safely retry almost anything else. I miss the simplicity of IRC, the way slack and discord smoothly transition between online and offline states is graceful and intuitive. That is how almost all software should behave.
xvilka 5y ago
It's even more essential in IoT and mobile devices, where reboot is often necessary, sometimes just to restore broken connection, like modem. Nobody works now on stable software, everyone tries to ship it as fast as possible. It's not necessarily bad thing, but it is certainly orthogonal to the persistence.
kingcharles 5y ago
Nowadays, if you can make your hobby OS run WebAssembly I think you'd be able to get a lot of functionality out of it, even if it can't run Office x86 binaries.
timka 5y ago
The plan is (was?) running any JVM stuff on their VM. Also, IIRC Dmitry was thinking about embedded systems applications at least back in 2011 when he was giving a talk about PhantomOS at HighLoad++ conference in Moscow.

josephg 5y ago

> all the network interfaces are effectively useless when the system wakes up This is - and probably always will be a problem with networked software. You should program as if TCP connections could drop at any time, for any reason. Browser tabs get backgrounded. Laptops go to sleep. Cell phones roam, and go into tunnels. Servers have temporary net splits. Most high level tasks can be retried safely. Nonces and things can be used to safely retry almost anything else. I miss the simplicity of IRC, the way slack and discord smoothly transition between online and offline states is graceful and intuitive. That is how almost all software should behave.

xvilka 5y ago

It's even more essential in IoT and mobile devices, where reboot is often necessary, sometimes just to restore broken connection, like modem. Nobody works now on stable software, everyone tries to ship it as fast as possible. It's not necessarily bad thing, but it is certainly orthogonal to the persistence.

kingcharles 5y ago

Nowadays, if you can make your hobby OS run WebAssembly I think you'd be able to get a lot of functionality out of it, even if it can't run Office x86 binaries.

timka 5y ago

The plan is (was?) running any JVM stuff on their VM. Also, IIRC Dmitry was thinking about embedded systems applications at least back in 2011 when he was giving a talk about PhantomOS at HighLoad++ conference in Moscow.