Re: [TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

On Sep 16, 2021, at 5:44 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 08:34:52PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>> What's changed is that we now take for granted that Linux is there, and
>>> we've stopped asking questions about anything outside of that model.
>> 
>> It's unclear to me that Linux is blamed as the reason why researchers
>> have stopped asking questions outside of that model.  Why should Linux
>> have this effect when the presence of Unix didn't?
> 
> Linux runs on _everything_.  From your phone to the top 500 HPC clusters.
> 
> Unix, for all that it did, never had that level of success.  I credit
> Unix for a lot, including showing Linux what it should be, but Linux
> took that model and ran with it.
> 
> Plan 9 is very cool but I am channeling my inner Clem, Plan 9 didn't meet
> Clem's law.  It was never compelling enough to make the masses love it.
> Linux was good enough.

Things might have been different if Plan9 was open sourced in the same time
frame as 386BSD and early Linux. Back then Linux was not good enough. plan9
was not all that different from unix and simpler to understand and use.

> We can argue about if that is a good thing or not, I've watched Linux
> become more complex and seen docker et al react to that.

As Marshall Conover (& later I) said, containers & docker filled a genuine
need. Not much to do with the complexity of Linux. Plan9 could've provided
a much simpler and cleaner platform than linux but that was not to be.
[plan has a couple of global names spaces that might have needed changing.
Specifically the process id and '#' driver spaces]


-- Bakul