5 ms·

If you have an idempotent service, why do you need the accumulated cruft of 40 years of bad ideas to provide it?

• SwellJoe 12y ago
  So, UNIX boils down to "the accumulated cruft of 40 years of bad ideas"? I'm not disagreeing on the principle of immutable servers, but that's a pretty bold claim. I don't see getting rid of the "accumulated cruft" as being a particularly interesting reason for exploring the unikernel or immutable server concept. The benefit is in building for scale and redundancy. The lighter your image, the easier it becomes to replicate it and maintain it, generally speaking. Further, there is an argument to be made that building your own cruft into your system is counter-productive compared to letting the operating system cruft handle it. The Linux developers are probably better at it than you or me; unless we understand our usage patterns dramatically better and the options for optimizing them, it may be best to trust the OS "cruft" to do the right thing. In short, I'm not really taking a side on this one. I believe there is interesting research to be done, and probably useful outcomes to be found, in this direction. But, why dismiss 40 years of operating system refinement by some of the brightest minds in the world as "accumulated cruft...of bad ideas"?
  • jfb 12y ago
    Because that cruft has grown up in service of a timesharing model of computation that no longer holds. Why does my phone have a root user? Why do I have to escalate privileges to bind to ports < 1000? Why am I context switching at all? I think it's a mistake to conflate path dependence and correctness.