5 ms·

Operating system research – 16 years perspective (2008)

51 points by luu 12y ago

kabdib 12y ago
My take: Anything that tries to hide the underlying asynchronous nature of modern computing is going to get you into a heap of trouble when the abstraction breaks (and it will). RPC is magical thinking (and it was always a bad idea), synchronous messaging will make you loved by hardware vendors as you come back to buy faster and beefier machines, and if you're doing distributed shared memory, well, good luck with that. I have little to say about microkernels (and yeah, I've worked on them) other than the good systems seem to start out micro-kernelish and then mutate into something useable, while the good monolithic systems start start looking more like microkernels over time, so the truth is probably in the middle. That caching on file servers and file replication were ever controversial seems quaint. :-)
dkarapetyan 12y ago
Pike's comment about programming languages is a little funny given that he was one of the authors of Go and several other languages meant to simplify distributed/parallel computing.
- bjwbell 12y ago
  Humbleness is good.
dmix 12y ago
It makes me sad both links to the old messages are broken. This post is only 6 years old. The internet is too fragile.
- pm90 12y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173759/http://fred.cambridge.ma.us/c.o.r.flame/msg00000.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173759/http://fred.cambr... and https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173017/http://fred.cambridge.ma.us/c.o.r.flame/msg00025.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173017/http://fred.cambr...
- ciupicri 12y ago
  Besides Archive.org, there's also another reliable source for the second email: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum
  - StephenFalken 12y ago
    You can also read the original USENET post on comp.os.research here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI/x6rB1TFKjVkJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI...
    - ciupicri 12y ago
      I've thought of using Google Groups too, but to my surprise I wasn't able to find the messages by searching for one of the email subjects.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

51 points by luu 12y ago

My take: Anything that tries to hide the underlying asynchronous nature of modern computing is going to get you into a heap of trouble when the abstraction breaks (and it will). RPC is magical thinking (and it was always a bad idea), synchronous messaging will make you loved by hardware vendors as you come back to buy faster and beefier machines, and if you're doing distributed shared memory, well, good luck with that. I have little to say about microkernels (and yeah, I've worked on them) other than the good systems seem to start out micro-kernelish and then mutate into something useable, while the good monolithic systems start start looking more like microkernels over time, so the truth is probably in the middle. That caching on file servers and file replication were ever controversial seems quaint. :-)

dkarapetyan 12y ago

Pike's comment about programming languages is a little funny given that he was one of the authors of Go and several other languages meant to simplify distributed/parallel computing.

bjwbell 12y ago
Humbleness is good.

dmix 12y ago

It makes me sad both links to the old messages are broken. This post is only 6 years old. The internet is too fragile.

pm90 12y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173759/http://fred.cambridge.ma.us/c.o.r.flame/msg00000.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173759/http://fred.cambr... and https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173017/http://fred.cambridge.ma.us/c.o.r.flame/msg00025.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173017/http://fred.cambr...
ciupicri 12y ago
Besides Archive.org, there's also another reliable source for the second email: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum
- StephenFalken 12y ago
  You can also read the original USENET post on comp.os.research here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI/x6rB1TFKjVkJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.research/fw2frykLjOI...
  - ciupicri 12y ago
    I've thought of using Google Groups too, but to my surprise I wasn't able to find the messages by searching for one of the email subjects.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]