[TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Rich Morin]

FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.

"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM

-r

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Rich Morin wrote in <5A5107E4-06AD-4C2B-B590-15C17B301D44@cfcl.com>:
 |FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
 |
 |"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
 |https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM

That is the one who mutilated the FreeBSD fortune program no?
(Despite it saying

  The potentially offensive fortunes are installed by default on FreeBSD
  systems.  If you're absolutely, *positively*, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt
  sure that your user community goes berzerk/sues your pants off/drops dead
  upon reading one of them, edit the Makefile in the subdirectory datfiles,
  and do "make all install".)

Nothing but a hollow lie ever since!

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Kevin Bowling]

Apropos of nothing, I've noticed there are a handful of systems
charlatans that fast talk, relish in condencention, and make lame
humor to try to appeal to the unlearned (because systems has become
fairly esoteric in the expanding industry) frequenting the conference
tracks.  I guess everyone is supposed to be impressed.  Cool.

IMO not worth this list's time.

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 1:35 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:
>
> Rich Morin wrote in <5A5107E4-06AD-4C2B-B590-15C17B301D44@cfcl.com>:
>  |FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
>  |
>  |"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
>  |https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
>
> That is the one who mutilated the FreeBSD fortune program no?
> (Despite it saying
>
>   The potentially offensive fortunes are installed by default on FreeBSD
>   systems.  If you're absolutely, *positively*, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt
>   sure that your user community goes berzerk/sues your pants off/drops dead
>   upon reading one of them, edit the Makefile in the subdirectory datfiles,
>   and do "make all install".)
>
> Nothing but a hollow lie ever since!
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Kathryn Spiers]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1161 bytes --]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 12:35 Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> Rich Morin wrote in <5A5107E4-06AD-4C2B-B590-15C17B301D44@cfcl.com>:
>  |FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
>  |
>  |"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
>  |https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
>
> That is the one who mutilated the FreeBSD fortune program no?
> (Despite it saying
>
>   The potentially offensive fortunes are installed by default on FreeBSD
>   systems.  If you're absolutely, *positively*, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt
>   sure that your user community goes berzerk/sues your pants off/drops dead
>   upon reading one of them, edit the Makefile in the subdirectory datfiles,
>   and do "make all install".)
>
> Nothing but a hollow lie ever since!
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
>

Or you could remove the offensive fortunes and make the default more
friendly for everyone...

Probably best not to re-litigate that change on this thread though.
-K

>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2424 bytes --]

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Hello Kathry.

Kathryn Spiers wrote in <CAGM9nhRPfZA2s17ociJfUTyq6WGt1rsqq=796xGynRD9c3\
bZbg@mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 12:35 Steffen Nurpmeso <[1]steffen@sdaoden.eu[/1]> \
 |wrote:
 |
 |  [1] mailto:steffen@sdaoden.eu
 |
 ||Rich Morin wrote in <[2]5A5107E4-06AD-4C2B-B590-15C17B301D44@cfcl.com[/2\
 ||]>:
 || |FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
 || |
 || |"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
 || |[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM[/3]
 |
 ||That is the one who mutilated the FreeBSD fortune program no?
 ||(Despite it saying
 |
 ||  The potentially offensive fortunes are installed by default on FreeBSD
 ||  systems.  If you're absolutely, *positively*, without-a-shadow-of-a-\
 ||doubt
 ||  sure that your user community goes berzerk/sues your pants off/drops \
 ||dead
 ||  upon reading one of them, edit the Makefile in the subdirectory \
 ||datfiles,
 ||  and do "make all install".)
 |
 ||Nothing but a hollow lie ever since!
 ...
 |Or you could remove the offensive fortunes and make the default more \
 |friendly for everyone...
 |
 |Probably best not to re-litigate that change on this thread though.

Maybe the latter.  But for the former.  A citation is a citation,
and whereas you can clean your house, with huge amounts of
desinfection and insecticides, you could claim but i promise it is
not clean, and never will be, yes, in fact you will not even stay
alive without a tremendous amount of bacteria and more inside of
you, and on your surface.  But you do end up in a deserted and
deadly place.

So you remove citations of Hitler which are prominently marked as
Hitler citations, because you claim that is less offensive and
makes the world a smoothie place, but i do not think so.  In the
thread by then i think i said something like "back in the 70s
people had the capability to see things in a context", you know,
and if _i_ see a Hitler citation, then i, not only but also
because i am German, put that in a tremendous, let me say in
a monstrous context.  And it is plain, dear Lady, that the demon
is not gone, it is in almost each and everyone.  And in _my_
opinion, the "cleaning" that has been done is nothing but
a trivialisation, which goes alongside a common flattening that
happens in public discourse in general.

This is nothing new, and people sang about "shiny happy people"
decades ago, and have by far not been the first which did.  If
i recall correctly, the actual argument on the removal, which if
i recall happened "just like that", without discussion or that
issue tracker that FreeBSD now uses, was because of a Hitler
citation on women.  If i recall correctly it was in turn
a citation which revealed that Hitler did not understand Nietzsche
correctly.  Maybe i understand Nietzsche false.  Nietzsche also
sings and dances alongside the road that Richard Wagner claimed
some decades before Nietzsches book we are talking about.  Hitler
also was impressed by Wagner's art and saying, yet, did he
understand it, really?  So we are now about enter the space of
culture, philosophy and religion, the human being and its way of
self-organization, about the necessity of self-reflection, as
called for, and named, by the mentioned.  Will you ever be able to
develop self-reflection without a context, dear Lady, i am asking?

Off-topic, whereas i blame Hitler, and the endless shame that comes
alongside -- and today in a week is the 75th anniversary of the
rescue, of the remains, of Auschwitz --, the older i get, the less
i can blame my forefathers desires.  I can stand this ground, and
it is good that after WWII the winners acted more wise and
reflected than after WWI.  And i thought it was Churchill, but
i think it has been John F. Kennedy who said ~"either mankind will
put an end on war, or war will put an end on mankind".

Citations have been placed in a Unix distribution, to come back to
the topic.  Decades ago.  I do not think it was a giggling funny
old man who put them there, but even a giggling funny old man has
decades of life to look onto.  I who approach my 50ies in a not
too distant future (if i am lucky) have already seen dozens of
dirty wars, thousands of lies, and aggressively put false contexts
which are not lies yet are lies indeed, and millions and millions
of terrible deaths, and maybe-death-would-have-been-better's, too.
I personally do not think this gets better if the public discourse
becomes even more superficial or even becomes the total farce of
misinformation as opposed to slight censorship, which happens in
the western world even without official propaganda, which i hate
to the bottom of my heart.

But i am not Mr. Clean, the falsely understood.  My only concern
on the MeToo that i hate, is that the Suffragettes get finally
blown away because those who came up short wanted to have a whole
evening on Netflix or the BBC (nice neighbours for sure),
exclusively.  I have not and never had problems with strong women,
they always existed, and my very personal point of view is in fact
that today we have a lot less of strong women with personality
than when i was young.  And ever and ever again i read and see
stories of strong women from more than hundred years ago, when
Germany indeed was a source of science, culture and beauty, too.
I cannot do anything against people who read the bible as an
operator's guide, nor mental hedgehoppers which do not get
Nietzsche nor Wagner right, but only Might and Money.  The problem
seems to be that these people govern the world.

No, the sticky and greasy cloud cover of misinformation and
superficiality sometimes has to be torn open, and i admire that
the *BSD fortune program took the opportunity to burst in the
focused and selfish view that most people, me included, have on
a day by day base.  And how often do i myself become conscious of
something that i did not understand first, take the line Wagner
.. Nietzsche, .. and the incapable brain which did not get it
thereafter .. and has been lifted to responsibility nonetheless!
(Just a few weeks ago my eyes were opened that the "Fonty" in
Günther Grass's "Ein weites Feld" was indeed Theodor Fontane.
Granted that i did not really "lived" in "Ein weites Feld", but
maybe ... i should read it again!  But that is just bla.)

And, dear Lady, whereas i like friendliness, i think it should be
wholehearted and holistic.  Removing some citations which, by the
very heart of a citation, have a context, in which they should be
contemplated, strives me as peculiar if at the same time we,
western world citizens, either directly or indirectly, by means of
our buying behaviour, for example, kill or suppress people, and
even destroy life on earth as such.
Regarding MeToo i am happy that here in Germany this overheated
thing has been normalizest; crimes are crimes, and need to be
punished (maybe i am an antisemit when i bring sympathy to the
Public Enemy text "Jeffrey Dahmer, into the room without cuffs --
how the hell do we get stuffed????  In the back of a cell on an
Isle.").  But what if Jack Nicholson would have not been brought
to go nuts in Shining, what if Brad Pitt would not have had to
repeat the scene where he drags the dead Hector dozens of times,
what if raped "bitches" (or non-bitches) would look like if they
come from a gala dinner.  That is just grazy.

I personally do not think that removing these citations made the
world a better place.  And whereas i also do not think that it
make the world a worse place, hah, i start hoping he could impress
a nice young women, they got married and have some kids.
A nice evening i wish,
Miss Kathryn Spiers,

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Vincenzo Nicosia]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 11:27:39AM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
> 
> "What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
> 

...which is along the same lines of the talk the same guy gave about
systemd and why everybody should like it. The message is simple: we
just want to run our shiny MacBooks and we don't understand Unix
anyway, so we'd better get rid of it and move on.

A flawed analysis that obviously leads to flawed conclusions.

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Tyler Adams]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 869 bytes --]

His example of the USB driver was pretty silly. The unix code even *looked*
cleaner and straightforward compared to the convoluted windows/mac messes,
but he's mad because he had to figure out a *filepath*. What!?


 Tyler


On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 12:37 PM Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz@freaknet.org>
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 11:27:39AM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> > FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
> >
> > "What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
> >
>
> ...which is along the same lines of the talk the same guy gave about
> systemd and why everybody should like it. The message is simple: we
> just want to run our shiny MacBooks and we don't understand Unix
> anyway, so we'd better get rid of it and move on.
>
> A flawed analysis that obviously leads to flawed conclusions.
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1478 bytes --]

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Warner Losh]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4103 bytes --]

Benno's talks (systemd and this one) weren't wrong. Systemd *is* a dumpster
fire. It has a lot of cool ideas, but is coded by someone that has poor
listening skills and is more stubborn than he's technically competent. It's
had a crapton of severe security bugs in it. It's given us abominations
like eth4156 as a NIC name. It doesn't like it when you & a job and log out
for Pete's sake. It's a total mess that breaks everything to try to push
the state of the art. Beno's talk on it may have been a little over the
top, but he's not wrong about much of his criticism. Systemd has swung too
far from the do one thing and do it well philosophy, admittedly in ways
that are ham-fisted and don't necessarily mean that it's philosophically
wrong, that it shows at least some of thee wisdom of simplicity.

Benno's Unix talk is similar. He's not wrong. The everything is a file
paradigm has issues.

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 3:47 AM Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote:

> His example of the USB driver was pretty silly. The unix code even
> *looked* cleaner and straightforward compared to the convoluted
> windows/mac messes, but he's mad because he had to figure out a *filepath*.
> What!?
>

Figure a  dozen file paths out, cat the right thing to them so other files
show up and  then you can  do the same thing again? That's  not a sane
interface. Everything isn't a file.  We've known this since the 70's. The
first NCP/TCP stacks were terrible in this way. You opened /dev/net/london.
And while that sounds cool, it means you have to have some kind of name
lookup in kernel which isn't a directory lookup. You either need a userland
daemon to do  the work and sleep, or you need to do crazy things like that
in the kernel. And there was no really good way to do what we do with
select, poll, kqueue or the like. And trying to do really high end, high
data rate stuff with read/write is inefficient.

At Netflix we use sendfile for our stuff. It's one of the least
unixy things in the kernel. It reads from a file, then TLS encrypts the
file and sends it out the socket. This means state has to be carefully
managed with some setup in userland before the handoff. The other non-unixy
thing is that it's all non blocking. sendfile asks for a set of pages from
a file. When they are ready, it gets a callback to schedule encryption, and
when that fires it's scheduled to the NIC for transmission and either
retransmission or freeing up depending on the ACKs that come back. At
~190Gbps, this isn't something one can do with the normal Unix interfaces,
which was the point of his talk. He's not wrong, but his examples could use
some work.

The real world is messy, and often requires complexity. Going too simple
for simplicity's sake is just as bad as going too complicated for
complexity's sake. A proper balance is needed. And he's not wrong to make
that point.

Warner

P.S. complaining about Benno's involvement in cleaning up FreeBSD's fortune
in response to his talk is lame and puerile. Totally off topic and typical
of the stupid and ill-informed attacks that he attracted around the code of
conduct stuff by jerks that had no stake in the FreeeBSD community, but
instead wanted to fight for their absolute right to be self-absorbed jerks
without consequences. It totally burned him out, and the FreeBSD community
lost a contributing member because of the grief he got. It's unbecoming to
see it on this list.


>  Tyler
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 12:37 PM Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz@freaknet.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 11:27:39AM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
>> > FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
>> >
>> > "What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
>> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
>> >
>>
>> ...which is along the same lines of the talk the same guy gave about
>> systemd and why everybody should like it. The message is simple: we
>> just want to run our shiny MacBooks and we don't understand Unix
>> anyway, so we'd better get rid of it and move on.
>>
>> A flawed analysis that obviously leads to flawed conclusions.
>>
>>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5404 bytes --]

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Kevin Bowling]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 9:35 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> Benno's talks (systemd and this one) weren't wrong. Systemd *is* a dumpster fire. It has a lot of cool ideas, but is coded by someone that has poor listening skills and is more stubborn than he's technically competent. It's had a crapton of severe security bugs in it. It's given us abominations like eth4156 as a NIC name. It doesn't like it when you & a job and log out for Pete's sake. It's a total mess that breaks everything to try to push the state of the art. Beno's talk on it may have been a little over the top, but he's not wrong about much of his criticism. Systemd has swung too far from the do one thing and do it well philosophy, admittedly in ways that are ham-fisted and don't necessarily mean that it's philosophically wrong, that it shows at least some of thee wisdom of simplicity.
>
> Benno's Unix talk is similar. He's not wrong. The everything is a file paradigm has issues.

The problem is this talk is just self aggrandizement at large.  It
would have been cute in the year 2000.  It's pretty ridiculous
cherry-picking hoping to target an unknowing audience in 2020.

I can alt/option+space on my FreeBSD desktop, open a monitor, and kill
a process in a GUI with a top right search box the exact same as OS X.
Cool.

Modern Linux distros don't even use X11 (except nested as OS X in case
of legacy application).

The crude APIs (he calls out Linux and Windows and BSD and C) are not
secret.  I would be surprised if Linus himself didn't agree that a lot
of the Linux interfaces suck.  There's just an issue of backwards
compatibility, and you know, doing some work instead of fishing for
social points at a conference.

Android has deviated significantly from Linux.  Linux from UNIX.
Basically nobody at a Linux conference is blindly following the UNIX
philosophy.  This message makes little sense to that crowd in absolute
terms.  The kindest critique I can give is:  fighting the last war.

> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 3:47 AM Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> His example of the USB driver was pretty silly. The unix code even looked cleaner and straightforward compared to the convoluted windows/mac messes, but he's mad because he had to figure out a filepath. What!?
>
>
> Figure a  dozen file paths out, cat the right thing to them so other files show up and  then you can  do the same thing again? That's  not a sane interface. Everything isn't a file.  We've known this since the 70's. The first NCP/TCP stacks were terrible in this way. You opened /dev/net/london. And while that sounds cool, it means you have to have some kind of name lookup in kernel which isn't a directory lookup. You either need a userland daemon to do  the work and sleep, or you need to do crazy things like that in the kernel. And there was no really good way to do what we do with select, poll, kqueue or the like. And trying to do really high end, high data rate stuff with read/write is inefficient.
>
> At Netflix we use sendfile for our stuff. It's one of the least unixy things in the kernel. It reads from a file, then TLS encrypts the file and sends it out the socket. This means state has to be carefully managed with some setup in userland before the handoff. The other non-unixy thing is that it's all non blocking. sendfile asks for a set of pages from a file. When they are ready, it gets a callback to schedule encryption, and when that fires it's scheduled to the NIC for transmission and either retransmission or freeing up depending on the ACKs that come back. At ~190Gbps, this isn't something one can do with the normal Unix interfaces, which was the point of his talk. He's not wrong, but his examples could use some work.
>
> The real world is messy, and often requires complexity. Going too simple for simplicity's sake is just as bad as going too complicated for complexity's sake. A proper balance is needed. And he's not wrong to make that point.
>
> Warner
>
> P.S. complaining about Benno's involvement in cleaning up FreeBSD's fortune in response to his talk is lame and puerile. Totally off topic and typical of the stupid and ill-informed attacks that he attracted around the code of conduct stuff by jerks that had no stake in the FreeeBSD community, but instead wanted to fight for their absolute right to be self-absorbed jerks without consequences. It totally burned him out, and the FreeBSD community lost a contributing member because of the grief he got. It's unbecoming to see it on this list.
>
>>
>>  Tyler
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 12:37 PM Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz@freaknet.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 11:27:39AM -0800, Rich Morin wrote:
>>> > FWIW, I found this talk to be quite amusing and interesting.
>>> >
>>> > "What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020)
>>> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
>>> >
>>>
>>> ...which is along the same lines of the talk the same guy gave about
>>> systemd and why everybody should like it. The message is simple: we
>>> just want to run our shiny MacBooks and we don't understand Unix
>>> anyway, so we'd better get rid of it and move on.
>>>
>>> A flawed analysis that obviously leads to flawed conclusions.
>>>

Re: [TUHS] "What UNIX Cost Us"

[Adam Thornton]

> On Jan 19, 2020, at 9:33 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> Benno's talks (systemd and this one) weren't wrong. Systemd *is* a dumpster fire. It has a lot of cool ideas, but is coded by someone that has poor listening skills and is more stubborn than he's technically competent. It's had a crapton of severe security bugs in it. It's given us abominations like eth4156 as a NIC name. It doesn't like it when you & a job and log out for Pete's sake. It's a total mess that breaks everything to try to push the state of the art.


Hoo boy.

I just had this argument on one of the Slacks I’m on.


> Beno's talk on it may have been a little over the top, but he's not wrong about much of his criticism. Systemd has swung too far from the do one thing and do it well philosophy, admittedly in ways that are ham-fisted and don't necessarily mean that it's philosophically wrong, that it shows at least some of thee wisdom of simplicity.


No, it’s philosophically wrong.

I will grant that there is a problem there that needs solving.  Let’s look at BSD rc and SysVinit; they’re both extremely difficult to automate installing and uninstalling services.  SysVInit works better than rc in that regard, but they’re both kind of crappy.  Let’s look at the things that suck about SysVInit:

1: no actual dependency graphs.  Sure, there was a whole framework of magic comments to sorta-kinda-glue one in.  Didn’t work very well.
2: tons of shell ceremony around start/stop/restart

What you want in an init system is:
First and foremost, a process manager, that acts as a signal handler of last resort.
  * It would be nice if it _can_ and _usually does_ run as PID 1, but doesn’t insist on it.
  * Has a firm notion of “this service depends on _that_ service” and can sequence startup and shutdown appropriately.
  * Has a declarative syntax that lets you configure most services with just a little declarative text, probably with an escape hatch for more complicated services

Here’s what you don’t want _in your init system_:

A new approach to logging that puts your logs in a human-unreadable binary format.

A system-wide event bus.  This is actually quite a good idea, but it doesn’t need to be part of the init system.

A sound manager.

You get the idea.

Yeah, SysVInit needed to be superseded.  Runit, Daemontools, Upstart all had reasonable approaches.  But the devouring hippo of SystemD won, mostly because Lennart worked at Red Hat.  And it’s a terrible idea because it tangles all these things together.  It’s also a terrible idea because your init system should have goals other than time from pressing the power button to getting a login prompt on Lennart’s laptop, but I digress.

> 
> Figure a  dozen file paths out, cat the right thing to them so other files show up and  then you can  do the same thing again? That's  not a sane interface. Everything isn't a file.  

[…]

To be fair: BSD sockets are not pretty, and they’re not elegant.  They won, and SysV Streams were worse in a lot of ways, but I still suspect there was some way of doing a TCP/IP stack that seemed more Unixy, without (maybe) needing DNS (or a service locator) in a sidecar userland process…but as soon as you start thinking about it, yeah, it gets gross.

> At Netflix we use sendfile for our stuff. It's one of the least unixy things in the kernel. It reads from a file, then TLS encrypts the file and sends it out the socket. This means state has to be carefully managed with some setup in userland before the handoff. The other non-unixy thing is that it's all non blocking. sendfile asks for a set of pages from a file. When they are ready, it gets a callback to schedule encryption, and when that fires it's scheduled to the NIC for transmission and either retransmission or freeing up depending on the ACKs that come back. At ~190Gbps, this isn't something one can do with the normal Unix interfaces, which was the point of his talk. He's not wrong, but his examples could use some work.

And here we see Unix as a victim of its own success.  It’s pretty damn weird, when you think about it, that we’re using a half-century-old typesetting system to power both the front and back ends of sending cat pictures and porn videos in real-time all over the planet all the time.

This also speaks to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf (mentioned here several months ago).     The fork()/exec() model is great in a single-threaded pipeline-processing model.  But, yeah, it’s totally true that it (and read()/write()) is not the best thing for writing user-facing nonblocking GUIs.

> The real world is messy, and often requires complexity. Going too simple for simplicity's sake is just as bad as going too complicated for complexity's sake. A proper balance is needed. And he's not wrong to make that point.

That said: Linux now has _way_ too many syscalls.  I would be flabbergasted if the rarely-used ones are not crawling with exploitable bugs.  I am surprised that Google hasn’t done more with fuchsia + gvisor (well, maybe they have but haven’t showed us yet).  Gvisor is a fascinating experiment in worse-is-better, in that, no, it makes no attempt to replace _all_ the Linux system calls, just the ones that _the programs you really want to run_ use.

Things do grow cruft over time.  And things change over time.  Containers are absolutely essential to what I’m doing these days.  They were not ten years ago.  Alpine is going there (in terms of a minimal container-focused support system (== OS layer), but clearly the more-right thing would be something like gvisor-plus-something-like-fuschia: my container only contains _code_ for the syscalls my application actually uses.  Can’t exploit what isn’t there.

This also hits the “People shouldn’t be using C in 2020” argument.  But _that_ in turn is less about C not providing modern strong typing features and letting you play fast and loose with pointers and making you do your own memory management, and more about: your computer is really, really not a PDP-11 anymore.  A language that provides the abstraction of a simple in-order execution stream is _lying_ to you.

The problem with that is that thinking about something as bizarrely complex as modern CPUs and writing software to exploit the way they actually work is _really really hard_.

Wow, that was a ramble.  Anyway: Benno’s not wrong.  But everything’s historically contingent, right?  We’ve got a half-century of C and a half-century of a typesetting system that got too big for its britches, that’s now running, basically, the entire underpinnings of the 21st century…I was going to say “economy” but really, it’s “world.”

Adam