

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf] - tush726
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf

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zvrba
This paper is more than 10 years old. Since then a new systems research arena
has emerged: virtualization / hypervisors. (Not exactly new, but new on the
consumer market. Before, VMs were only in the mainframe land.)

"Compatibility" has killed OS research, because the OS's main job is to
multiplex the underlying hardware among applications, and it seems that the
current OS's do that well enough.

I think that "systems research" has today moved towards building
infrastructure on top of VMs (Java / .Net). There's a lot of innovation there
which would have before went into a new shiny (and incompatible) OS. (Example:
Java security policies.)

Also: writing a new OS requires a lot of upfront investment with _zero_
research value: boot/startup code, managing the CPU's idiosyncrasies,
_drivers_ for bazillion of different HW units, a filesystem, TCP/IP stack,
etc. No wonder people just tweak existing systems, as it's almost impossible
to rip out these boring parts from Linux/*BSD kernels and reuse them in
something new.

My personal wish for furthering system's research of today is something that
would kill the need for hypervisors. Android, for example, runs each app under
a different UID, thus achieving isolation w/o hypervisor. Let's devise
something similar for desktops/servers; bonus points if the system can run
existing binaries.

~~~
amirmc
How about OSs that target the hypervisors? With hypervisors getting
everywhere, it becomes a viable platform on which we can re-evaluate the
assumptions we make about OSs.

For example, I'm working with a bunch of other people on MirageOS [1], which
is clean-slate, library OS written entirely in OCaml and targets the Xen
Hypervisor. Since Xen works on ARM devices, we'll also be able to create
applications/appliances for the coming wave of embedded devices (aka Internet
of Things) -- in addition to running things on the public cloud.

If you're interested in reading more, there's an ASPLOS paper [2] where you
can find out more. There will also be a CACM article in the New Year that
covers more of the wider background.

[1] [http://openmirage.org](http://openmirage.org) and
[http://nymote.org/blog/2013/overview-of-
mirage/](http://nymote.org/blog/2013/overview-of-mirage/)

[2] [http://nymote.org/docs/2013-asplos-
mirage.pdf](http://nymote.org/docs/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf)

~~~
zvrba
> How about OSs that target the hypervisors?

Yup, that's definitely a new area. I guess you're using the hypercall API
instead of pretending to talk to the raw HW?

In a way, the hypervisor has become "the" OS, while "an" OS is now just an
application running within the hypervisor. Can we avoid the additional
(hypervisor) layer? I think yes. But: 1) how, and [harder] 2) also while
maintaining compatibility with existing applications? (Not existing OS's, just
existing applications.)

~~~
ams6110
Does something like [http://erlangonxen.org/](http://erlangonxen.org/) fit
into this area?

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ahomescu1
> The holy trinity: Linux, gcc and Netscape. [...] Besides, systems research
> is doing little to advance the trinity.

It's easy to miss that this was pre-LLVM. LLVM was an interesting development
from the systems/design perspective more than the compiler technology one.

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jmount
"Programmability-- once the Big Idea in computing-- has fallen by the
wayside." ouch

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gdonelli
No mention on OSX and iOS, is Apple the new Microsoft these days?

~~~
ams6110
I think touch as a UI component qualifies as innovation, but OSX and iOS are
really just other variants of Unix.

