4 ms·

Xen largely came from the Systems group at Cambridge I think. Seems fairly relevant to the current state of computing to me. Not sure what is being worked on no

Xen largely came from the Systems group at Cambridge I think. Seems fairly relevant to the current state of computing to me. Not sure what is being worked on now that might be relevant in a decade and a half from now [edit to add: but there is probably something].

amirmc 12y ago
> Not sure what is being worked on now that might be relevant in a decade and a half from now. Mirage OS is one of those things - http://openmirage.org http://openmirage.org - though I expect (hope) it'll take much less than decade to be relevant. Some of the same team that worked on early Xen are working on Mirage.
- pron 12y ago
  And there's OSv, http://osv.io/ http://osv.io/, from the people behind KVM.
- josephlord 12y ago
  I've just realised that my last sentence which you quoted could be read as saying that what is currently being worked on won't be as relevant when it was really intended to mean that there is probably some things that are being done now that will be relevant in the future I just don't know what they are.
zetazzed 12y ago
Xen is an example, but, more generally, virtualization has been the big story in systems software for the period mentioned in this article (post-2000). VMware came out of systems research at Stanford and Xen out of Cambridge. The cloud world of AWS/Azure/GCE with tens of millions of VMs running for pennies per hour is a radical shift in how we think about systems. The new wave of Docker/containers promises to extend this idea even further up the stack. How can we call that "stagnation in software" since 2000?
- wrs 12y ago
  Virtualization as an operating system design feature predates that entire chart. A lot of the hard problems in the Xen/VMWare research related to implementing virtualization on a processor architecture (x86) that was extremely popular, but didn't actually support virtualization. Which is just the kind of stagnation he's talking about, I think.

amirmc 12y ago

> Not sure what is being worked on now that might be relevant in a decade and a half from now. Mirage OS is one of those things - http://openmirage.org http://openmirage.org - though I expect (hope) it'll take much less than decade to be relevant. Some of the same team that worked on early Xen are working on Mirage.

pron 12y ago
And there's OSv, http://osv.io/ http://osv.io/, from the people behind KVM.
josephlord 12y ago
I've just realised that my last sentence which you quoted could be read as saying that what is currently being worked on won't be as relevant when it was really intended to mean that there is probably some things that are being done now that will be relevant in the future I just don't know what they are.

zetazzed 12y ago

Xen is an example, but, more generally, virtualization has been the big story in systems software for the period mentioned in this article (post-2000). VMware came out of systems research at Stanford and Xen out of Cambridge. The cloud world of AWS/Azure/GCE with tens of millions of VMs running for pennies per hour is a radical shift in how we think about systems. The new wave of Docker/containers promises to extend this idea even further up the stack. How can we call that "stagnation in software" since 2000?

wrs 12y ago
Virtualization as an operating system design feature predates that entire chart. A lot of the hard problems in the Xen/VMWare research related to implementing virtualization on a processor architecture (x86) that was extremely popular, but didn't actually support virtualization. Which is just the kind of stagnation he's talking about, I think.