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How about creating an OS from scratch without bias from existing designs?
by hardware2win 4y ago
How about creating an OS from scratch without bias from existing designs?
- layer8 4y agoIt’s difficult to eliminate bias without also eliminating the lessons learned by history.
- pjmlp 4y agoApparently not much was learned in 50 years from doing systems programing in languages like C in regards to safety.
- eggy 4y agoI was a Minix fan before Linux, and Linus studied Minix to write Linux. I thought a microkernel was better than a monolithic kernel for security, reliability, portability, and simplicity reasons. But then again, Betamax was the better videotape format and VHS one out, so the best tech doesn't always win. I remember the heated exchanges between Linus and Andy back in the day. Funny someone commented above about Minix being antiquated from the 80s, and Andy had posted that Linux was technology from the 70s due to it choosing a monolithic kernel and being tied to x86 processors. I had MachTen, a BSD, Unix-like microkernel, running on my PowerMac in the early 90s.
- pjmlp 4y agoIronically, Minix runs Linux on Intel CPUs, and the Linux kernel jungling containers on top of an hypervisor, with DPKG, FUSE,... looks like a fat microkernel. On the cloud workloads, with kubernetes on top of hypervisors, the workload is more akin to microservers than anything else. Likewise on Android, since Project Treble and starting with Android 8, all newer drivers are userspace processes with Android IPC.
- eggy 4y agoThe Intel ME chip runs Minix, so I guess Minix runs a lot more than it would seem![1] [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236064/minix-the-most-popular-os-in-the-world-thanks-to-intel.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236064/minix-the-most-...
- kjs3 4y agoProbably because if we're teaching people 'Operating Systems', most people think 'operating systems and OS concepts we might actually use in our daily lives'. "Creating an OS from scratch without bias from existing designs" is for hobbies and PhDs, and there are a number of them out there.
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoWhat kind of bias?
- layer8 4y agoThere are design choices you probably wouldn’t make this way today for a new green-field OS, like the process forking mechanism, the POSIX threading and file IO API, the whole TTY architecture, and the file permissions model. These are all aspects that are different on Windows, for example. Similarly, starting with a stripped-down Windows, you wouldn’t end up with a Unix-like design.
- IshKebab 4y agoLook at all the things that Plan9 and Fuchsia do differently.
- lproven 4y agohttp://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/ ... is about the closest I know.