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Sorry, what salient points am I not engaging? The author of the linked piece is decrying what they perceive as a lack of "OS research and innovation" -- and I'

Sorry, what salient points am I not engaging? The author of the linked piece is decrying what they perceive as a lack of "OS research and innovation" -- and I'm saying that OS innovation remains alive and well, if perhaps more technical and less accessible than it once was. I can of course be more concrete and rattle these things off -- but I feel safe in leaving software systems advances since 2000 as an exercise to the reader...

linksnapzz 12y ago
In the link, you can see a chart, showing the hardware capabilities of a high-end workstations, sampled at roughly ten-year intervals. In twenty-five years, hardware capability has changed dramatically, while the kind of software used to get work done remains static (mostly). Why is that? Would you make the chart differently? The utah2K paper referred to in the link is admittedly (by the author) a polemic, so readers must understand that the writer may be shading things in a way more subjectively negative. Of course, that doesn't make it a trolling attempt, unless you can think of a particular chip the author wanted to knock off of a particular shoulder... You acknowledge that OS innovation "may be more technical and less accessible than it once was". Why is that? In what manner? I don't think that you and Pike are using "OS research & innovation" to refer to all of the same things at the same time. Here (from utah2K): "New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture -- and some do -- the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer. How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable? There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding)." ...I can't see why that isn't as true today as when it was written fourteen years ago. You can say that our Unix systems have improved, but that's a matter of degree, and not of type. We've also made great progress in breeding lean pigs that grow to marketable size in record time...but no matter how fine they are, they are still pigs, and aren't lobsters.
- kev009 12y ago
  This is non-sequitur, mainstream hardware has only evolved as well so why would there need to be a "forget everything you know" revolution? Conversely, is hardware research dead? The biggest change from 2000 is prevalence of NUMA, and this was even available back then in SGI and Sequent/IBM systems. I don't understand why systems software would have to substantially change until something like memristors drastically change systems architecture. For a while there has been less emphasis on individual systems and more effort put into distributed systems.. first with Hadoop style clusters and we're now breaking into Mesos style clusters that provide OS-like semantics and services over a network of systems. But there's a lot of good systems research going on today. Some of it is additive, some subtractive, but it's exists and is important.

linksnapzz 12y ago

In the link, you can see a chart, showing the hardware capabilities of a high-end workstations, sampled at roughly ten-year intervals. In twenty-five years, hardware capability has changed dramatically, while the kind of software used to get work done remains static (mostly). Why is that? Would you make the chart differently? The utah2K paper referred to in the link is admittedly (by the author) a polemic, so readers must understand that the writer may be shading things in a way more subjectively negative. Of course, that doesn't make it a trolling attempt, unless you can think of a particular chip the author wanted to knock off of a particular shoulder... You acknowledge that OS innovation "may be more technical and less accessible than it once was". Why is that? In what manner? I don't think that you and Pike are using "OS research & innovation" to refer to all of the same things at the same time. Here (from utah2K): "New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture -- and some do -- the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer. How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable? There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn't believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding)." ...I can't see why that isn't as true today as when it was written fourteen years ago. You can say that our Unix systems have improved, but that's a matter of degree, and not of type. We've also made great progress in breeding lean pigs that grow to marketable size in record time...but no matter how fine they are, they are still pigs, and aren't lobsters.

kev009 12y ago
This is non-sequitur, mainstream hardware has only evolved as well so why would there need to be a "forget everything you know" revolution? Conversely, is hardware research dead? The biggest change from 2000 is prevalence of NUMA, and this was even available back then in SGI and Sequent/IBM systems. I don't understand why systems software would have to substantially change until something like memristors drastically change systems architecture. For a while there has been less emphasis on individual systems and more effort put into distributed systems.. first with Hadoop style clusters and we're now breaking into Mesos style clusters that provide OS-like semantics and services over a network of systems. But there's a lot of good systems research going on today. Some of it is additive, some subtractive, but it's exists and is important.