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From: northern snowfall <dbailey27@ameritech.net>
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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way
References: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0305071048580.10670-100000@athena>
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Date: Wed,  7 May 2003 19:20:37 -0500
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>``Your conventional `good citizen' can be depended
>on not to be too thoughtful.  His ideas, beliefs,
>and practices are those of other people.  He loves
>and hates with them.  He is unreflectively loyal to
>the institutions under which he lives, and to the
>men who administer them.  But the really educated
>good man has no right to go along without question.''
>	- Henry Raymond Mussey
>
Somehow, I find it hard to believe that simply because
I've come to the same conclusion that other people
have, I'm a blindly loyal follower. The fact is I have
questioned. That is *why* I got interested in OS
research. That is *why* I forced myself to read the
entire BSD kernel and plan9 kernel before I even
fully understood the C language. That is *why* I
chose to take on my own OS development initiatives
to push myself further than what I've learned from
the above, and other, experiences. If two brilliant
men both surmise that E=MC2, is only the first one
that brings the subject to public light seen as
genius? Or, are they both respected for the hard
work they've done.
If you noticed, I said that there was merit in a lot of
the work done by the patchwork-quilt appendages
to the UNIX world, and others. If it wasn't for
Windows, I wouldn't even *be* involved in
computers, today. Just because these things have
design problems relating to their eventual growth
and extension doesn't mean they're any less usable
or worthy of praise. However, it *does* mean that
developers have to be wary in implementing new
techniques. VPN in a Windows environment is a
superb example of this. Look how many problems
the design of their driver architecture had when
attempting to implement a secure wide-area-network
infrastructure. Rather than pursuing a solution that
would afford e-business some security, they patched
in a simple driver that afforded horrible overlay of
crypto to a sickly protocol that was easily manipulated
by security analysts with a wide range of skill:
www.atstake.com, www.team-teso.net, etc. The
problems do not seem to end here. It isn't necessarily
that things *can't* be fixed, as much as it is that
to implement true dynamic flexibility in an Operating
System, certain things need to be adhered to. Namespaces,
presenting everything as files for simple resource
exportation, runes, plumbing, embedded authentication
semantics, to name a few, are all great examples of
ways to extend the capability of an OS for *years* of
research, when implementing new ideas, testing theory,
or whatever you're doing. UNIX simply failed to have
these things and because of the way the OS has been
structured from years of hacking and rehacking, it
would just be another *hack* to attempt implementation
of these ideas. We've seen attempts at these hacks
in projects like SELinux at the NSA and it is very
telling that their work seems to prove that, though name
spaces in a *NIX environment is a great ambition, the
underlying VFS/Net framework presents a serious
problem to the abstraction of isolated resource management,
severely crippling the implementation. So, what you
end up with is almost a redesigned Linux. Isn't it more
sensible to move to another OS with these ideas built
from the ground up, rather than spending a large amount
of time attempting to redesign the core of an OS whose
design is proven to be non-adherent to your goal?
Sheesh.

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