5 ms·

Why does no one question why we remain stuck with a 40-year-old state of the art? http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html http://www.e

Why does no one question why we remain stuck with a 40-year-old state of the art? http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....

sp332 17y ago
We're not "stuck" with it. There have been hundreds if not thousands of OS's written since then. Unix is still around because it's still useful. Just like the Sistine Chapel is still around because it's still beautiful. Experts come and clean it up and keep it nice :)
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  > There have been hundreds if not thousands of OS's written since then With a handful of exceptions, they were all Unix clones. Among the exceptions, almost all have kept the worst limitations of the Unix family.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - bad_user 17y ago
    Among the exceptions, almost all have kept the worst limitations of the Unix family. Is there some analysis on this issue available? What limitations have been kept? The only operating system that was supposed to be an improvement over Unix (that I know about) is Plan 9, but over time many ideas from Plan 9 have been ported to Unix. Unix today is not what it was 40 years ago ... the only legacy that's truly staying is the philosophy, which for better or worse, it works. Of course, Unix could be better. But let's be serious, what do you suppose we should do? Reinvent everything every 5 years?
    - asciilifeform 17y ago
      > What limitations have been kept? For example: multiple address spaces. The disk/RAM dichotomy is an atrocity, along with everything it entails (i.e. files.) There is no reason for the machine to expose multiple address spaces. The act of program installation and loading into memory, for example, should be one and the same. Think "Palm Pilot." RAM is in practice simply a cache of disk, and for some reason we are stuck "driving stick" and moving things into and out of it by hand. Why can't we treat it the same as L0/L1 cache? > what do you suppose we should do? How about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_(computer_science) and, while we're at it, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) And, in general, (not) these: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6gpwh/ask_reddit_what_atrocities_in_the_software_world/c03so2j http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6gpwh/ask_reddi...
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Not only "still useful", but an elegant tool for a more civilized age.
tybris 17y ago
Plenty of people question it, it's just that good. Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise. At best you can question whether it is simple enough (see Minix).
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  > Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise Why do you assume that simplicity necessarily equals Unix? Many of its design decisions were not mathematical inevitabilities, but are merely artifacts of hardware limitations which no longer exist: http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/print.html http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/prin... "The Jolitzes believed that from its origins as a series of quick, if elegant, hacks, Unix had hardened into a series of unquestioned rituals for getting things done. Many of these rituals were fossils -- work-arounds for hardware that no longer existed. "It's amazing how much we were still tied to the past," Lynne says. "The physical machines had been hauled away, but elements of the operating systems are still being implemented in the same way." She believes today's Linux and BSD developers are carrying on that unhelpful tradition. "It's like they're doing incantations," she says. "They're repeating what they've been taught, and they don't know what it means."
rbanffy 17y ago
That's really annoying. All in favor of porting Gnome, KDE, Firefox, Java and OpenOffice to Plan9 and to write device drivers for nasty things like 3D accelerators, wireless network interfaces and so on, raise your hands. clicking... "reply"... with my... nose...
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  I've always wondered why porting drivers has never been automated.
  - krakensden 17y ago
    It depends on what you mean by 'driver'. FUSE has certainly created a portable set of filesystem drivers for several operating systems. There are also things like ndiswrapper and project evil to wrap windows network drivers for various unixy systems. The real reason that most drivers don't get ported seems fairly obvious though. Different systems expose different amounts of surface area, different programming models, etc. Why is the current standard of tight coupling bad? Gains in portability are generally offset by a loss in performance, which isn't really something you want on your root filesystem or your graphics card (or your server's NIC, as a counterbalance to ndiswrapper).
10ren 17y ago
You're perplexed? Imagine how Thompson and Ritchie feel after improving unix with Plan 9, and everyone stays stuck with unix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
- krakensden 17y ago
  Union filesystems are common in Linux systems, and basically every modern "Unix" (Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Linux...) supports /proc. A lot of the other 'absolutely everything is a file' stuff is cute, but not having it isn't so terrible. Some people seem to like the text editor, but some people like nedit- there's no accounting for taste. Seriously, it's easy to be angry, but what do you miss from Plan 9 specifically? Why?
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Tone is hard to convey online. I guess I should have added a smiley. I'm not angry at all; I don't miss anything from Plan 9. I just feel sorry for these guys who went to so much trouble to make a "proper" OS that fixed up one they hacked together (unix).
    - 10ren 17y ago
      [10 days pass...] I wonder if unix beat Plan 9 because it was established in the market (certainly a huge factor), or if its hacked together approach was somehow intrinsically better (as in the "worse is better" essay); or maybe that there were some specific decisions in Plan 9 that were bad in practice (though they seemed good to the designers). I guess unix being established and being adaptable makes it very hard to displace - so the first factor swamps any effect of the other two.
bayareaguy 17y ago
Probably for the same reason we're still using that 3000-year-old state of the art known as "place-value": we haven't really found anything fundamentally better to replace it... yet.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  > we haven't really found anything fundamentally better This is plainly false if you bother to lift a finger and read about the ideas of Genera, CoyotOS, ErOS, Smalltalk, etc. The UNIXes (and VMS, and its mutant Microsoft progeny) are pieces of junk which remain popular solely through network effects.
  - bayareaguy 17y ago
    I have read about some of those. Unfortunately I must have missed or misunderstood something since I can't think of anything they offer that makes them worth adopting over Unix. It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. The idea of the World Wide Web wasn't all that impressive to me when I first saw it, partially because I'd already been using networks for almost a decade before it and was completely adapted to using arcane file transfer commands. It could be that there are some ideas in those systems that are just as revolutionary and I've missed them. Could you perhaps choose one or two of the ideas you think make those systems fundamentally better than Unix and elaborate on them?
    - asciilifeform 17y ago
      Orthogonal persistence, for one. All of the gymnastics we currently perform to make data outlive unplugging are a waste of precious lifetime: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794
      - bayareaguy 17y ago
        Ok lets consider this. I'm willing to believe that we could eliminate some of these "gymnastics" by adopting new persistence models but not without paying a cost somewhere else. Perhaps that cost is only some additional education but I'm not convinced things are that simple. A decade or two ago many organizations tried proprietary object-oriented databases for various applications in part because they purported to simplify persistence issues. For some specific applications they did but more often than not the problems they caused their users were worse than the ones they solved and most ultimately decided to settle for app servers and ORM solutions. I've always thought a key barrier to the adoption of systems that support Orthogonal persistence is that it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently as ones designed to use lower level things like files or databases, partly because many techniques (e.g. efficient working set management, concurrency control, schema change, replication, data archival) are pretty well understood for applications that use the latter on systems like Unix. Maybe there are new opportunities for orthogonal persistence now that distributed cloud storage and computing is becoming popular. Such an OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage could change things. However none of the systems you mentioned look like good candidates to me for such change.

sp332 17y ago

We're not "stuck" with it. There have been hundreds if not thousands of OS's written since then. Unix is still around because it's still useful. Just like the Sistine Chapel is still around because it's still beautiful. Experts come and clean it up and keep it nice :)

asciilifeform 17y ago
> There have been hundreds if not thousands of OS's written since then With a handful of exceptions, they were all Unix clones. Among the exceptions, almost all have kept the worst limitations of the Unix family.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- bad_user 17y ago
  Among the exceptions, almost all have kept the worst limitations of the Unix family. Is there some analysis on this issue available? What limitations have been kept? The only operating system that was supposed to be an improvement over Unix (that I know about) is Plan 9, but over time many ideas from Plan 9 have been ported to Unix. Unix today is not what it was 40 years ago ... the only legacy that's truly staying is the philosophy, which for better or worse, it works. Of course, Unix could be better. But let's be serious, what do you suppose we should do? Reinvent everything every 5 years?
  - asciilifeform 17y ago
    > What limitations have been kept? For example: multiple address spaces. The disk/RAM dichotomy is an atrocity, along with everything it entails (i.e. files.) There is no reason for the machine to expose multiple address spaces. The act of program installation and loading into memory, for example, should be one and the same. Think "Palm Pilot." RAM is in practice simply a cache of disk, and for some reason we are stuck "driving stick" and moving things into and out of it by hand. Why can't we treat it the same as L0/L1 cache? > what do you suppose we should do? How about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_(computer_science) and, while we're at it, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) And, in general, (not) these: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6gpwh/ask_reddit_what_atrocities_in_the_software_world/c03so2j http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6gpwh/ask_reddi...
rbanffy 17y ago
Not only "still useful", but an elegant tool for a more civilized age.

tybris 17y ago

Plenty of people question it, it's just that good. Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise. At best you can question whether it is simple enough (see Minix).

asciilifeform 17y ago
> Questioning simplicity is a futile exercise Why do you assume that simplicity necessarily equals Unix? Many of its design decisions were not mathematical inevitabilities, but are merely artifacts of hardware limitations which no longer exist: http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/print.html http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/05/17/386bsd/prin... "The Jolitzes believed that from its origins as a series of quick, if elegant, hacks, Unix had hardened into a series of unquestioned rituals for getting things done. Many of these rituals were fossils -- work-arounds for hardware that no longer existed. "It's amazing how much we were still tied to the past," Lynne says. "The physical machines had been hauled away, but elements of the operating systems are still being implemented in the same way." She believes today's Linux and BSD developers are carrying on that unhelpful tradition. "It's like they're doing incantations," she says. "They're repeating what they've been taught, and they don't know what it means."

rbanffy 17y ago

That's really annoying. All in favor of porting Gnome, KDE, Firefox, Java and OpenOffice to Plan9 and to write device drivers for nasty things like 3D accelerators, wireless network interfaces and so on, raise your hands. clicking... "reply"... with my... nose...

asciilifeform 17y ago
I've always wondered why porting drivers has never been automated.
- krakensden 17y ago
  It depends on what you mean by 'driver'. FUSE has certainly created a portable set of filesystem drivers for several operating systems. There are also things like ndiswrapper and project evil to wrap windows network drivers for various unixy systems. The real reason that most drivers don't get ported seems fairly obvious though. Different systems expose different amounts of surface area, different programming models, etc. Why is the current standard of tight coupling bad? Gains in portability are generally offset by a loss in performance, which isn't really something you want on your root filesystem or your graphics card (or your server's NIC, as a counterbalance to ndiswrapper).

10ren 17y ago

You're perplexed? Imagine how Thompson and Ritchie feel after improving unix with Plan 9, and everyone stays stuck with unix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

krakensden 17y ago
Union filesystems are common in Linux systems, and basically every modern "Unix" (Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Linux...) supports /proc. A lot of the other 'absolutely everything is a file' stuff is cute, but not having it isn't so terrible. Some people seem to like the text editor, but some people like nedit- there's no accounting for taste. Seriously, it's easy to be angry, but what do you miss from Plan 9 specifically? Why?
- 10ren 17y ago
  Tone is hard to convey online. I guess I should have added a smiley. I'm not angry at all; I don't miss anything from Plan 9. I just feel sorry for these guys who went to so much trouble to make a "proper" OS that fixed up one they hacked together (unix).
  - 10ren 17y ago
    [10 days pass...] I wonder if unix beat Plan 9 because it was established in the market (certainly a huge factor), or if its hacked together approach was somehow intrinsically better (as in the "worse is better" essay); or maybe that there were some specific decisions in Plan 9 that were bad in practice (though they seemed good to the designers). I guess unix being established and being adaptable makes it very hard to displace - so the first factor swamps any effect of the other two.

bayareaguy 17y ago

Probably for the same reason we're still using that 3000-year-old state of the art known as "place-value": we haven't really found anything fundamentally better to replace it... yet.

asciilifeform 17y ago
> we haven't really found anything fundamentally better This is plainly false if you bother to lift a finger and read about the ideas of Genera, CoyotOS, ErOS, Smalltalk, etc. The UNIXes (and VMS, and its mutant Microsoft progeny) are pieces of junk which remain popular solely through network effects.
- bayareaguy 17y ago
  I have read about some of those. Unfortunately I must have missed or misunderstood something since I can't think of anything they offer that makes them worth adopting over Unix. It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. The idea of the World Wide Web wasn't all that impressive to me when I first saw it, partially because I'd already been using networks for almost a decade before it and was completely adapted to using arcane file transfer commands. It could be that there are some ideas in those systems that are just as revolutionary and I've missed them. Could you perhaps choose one or two of the ideas you think make those systems fundamentally better than Unix and elaborate on them?
  - asciilifeform 17y ago
    Orthogonal persistence, for one. All of the gymnastics we currently perform to make data outlive unplugging are a waste of precious lifetime: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=643794
    - bayareaguy 17y ago
      Ok lets consider this. I'm willing to believe that we could eliminate some of these "gymnastics" by adopting new persistence models but not without paying a cost somewhere else. Perhaps that cost is only some additional education but I'm not convinced things are that simple. A decade or two ago many organizations tried proprietary object-oriented databases for various applications in part because they purported to simplify persistence issues. For some specific applications they did but more often than not the problems they caused their users were worse than the ones they solved and most ultimately decided to settle for app servers and ORM solutions. I've always thought a key barrier to the adoption of systems that support Orthogonal persistence is that it's harder to make applications designed around it perform as efficiently as ones designed to use lower level things like files or databases, partly because many techniques (e.g. efficient working set management, concurrency control, schema change, replication, data archival) are pretty well understood for applications that use the latter on systems like Unix. Maybe there are new opportunities for orthogonal persistence now that distributed cloud storage and computing is becoming popular. Such an OS specifically designed for application providers running on large clusters with S3-style storage could change things. However none of the systems you mentioned look like good candidates to me for such change.