
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000) - uriel
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
======
GeneralMaximus
The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku
(<http://haiku-os.org>), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a lot of
energy is spent on POSIX compatibility (Haiku is not UNIX, but there's a
compatibility layer that allows trivial POSIX software to compile with very
few changes, and makes porting larger pieces of software possible).

This, of course, has to be done. Otherwise there will be a whole bunch of
software future Haiku users will miss out on, and a whole bunch of trivial
software the developers would have to rewrite from scratch. Oh, and then it
would take way too much effort to port Perl, Python, Ruby, Vim ...

These days, "portable software" pretty much means "targets POSIX".

~~~
uriel
There is a reason Plan 9 dumped PoSix, there is APE (
<http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape> ) but to properly
maintain it would take way more effort than the rest of the OS.

And it is becoming even worse, 'all the world is a vax' has become 'all cpus
are x86(-64), all the kernels are linux, all the libcs are glibc, and all the
compilers are gcc', portability of most software is awful, and auto*hell only
makes things much worse.

~~~
krakensden
On the other hand, in that world at least you only have the broken insanity of
one operating system/library stack to worry about instead of three or four.

``Not Linux'' is not the same as 'perfect', no matter what the *BSD people
say.

------
timf
Written August 5th, 2000

"Irrelevant: Does not influence industry"

Two years later came Xen, a systems research project that has definitely
influenced industry.

~~~
kmavm
And two years earlier had come VMware.

The explosion of interest in virtualization was started by VMware, a
commercial entity, which rather makes Pike's point. Xen was started in
response to the lack of an academia-friendly platform for virtualization
research; "paravirtualization" was not initially a design goal, but rather an
expedient choice to avoid the difficulties of correctly virtualizing the x86.

And while I'm biased, VMware's solution to this problem (dynamic binary
translation from supervisor x86 to user-level x86) is massively more
inventive, interesting and _useful_ than Xen's solution (hack up the kernel).
I emphasize "useful", because a lot of VMware's customers were most interested
in running Windows, which was not paravirtulization-ready until 2008, a full
ten years after VMware's products were available.

~~~
timf
VMware's awesome... but its roots are also in academia, the company was
started by a Stanford professor and his PhD students.

It seems like a circular argument if the criteria of an academic project
"successfully influencing industry" is widespread adoption but that adoption
cannot be facilitated by a commercial entity.

 _[As a side note -- the impetus for Xen, and also somewhat for VMware, was in
a vision of global appliance-based computing, not in "virtualization
research." I think that is really interesting given what just happened in this
area in the last 3 or 4 years.]_

------
cpr
I'm wondering if it's time for a revival of the capability-based OS's of the
70's, such as Hydra/C.mmp, CMU's flagship OS of the time.

Seems like the raw performance is there, and the CPU parallelism is there.
Certainly the time is ripe for a more secure basis for operating systems, and
capabilities still seem like one of the best theoretical foundations around.

------
dinkumthinkum
Maybe someone should inform SOSP. By the way guys virtualization is hardly the
only thing going on in systems research. As far as the Web replacing the OS...
Honestly if HTTP/HTML is the sole future of innovation in computing then that
is a bit sad. As for Cloud Computing, well, let's say the reports of the
demise of systems research have been greatly, greatly exagerrated. Actually,
looking at my dept this just seems to be a pitifully naive view.there are
plenty of projects and not the time nor enough grad students to do them all.

------
heresyforme
New OS stagnation could be showing the trend away from the OS. A return to the
terminal? Cloud computing could be the first new step of many. In many ways we
may no longer need the local OS.

