From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 31918 invoked from network); 17 Sep 2021 00:35:18 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 17 Sep 2021 00:35:18 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id A0D9E9CAB9; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:35:16 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C0A269CAB3; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:34:59 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 9A0499CAB3; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:34:57 +1000 (AEST) Received: from outgoing.mit.edu (outgoing-auth-1.mit.edu [18.9.28.11]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 151DF9CAB2 for ; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:34:56 +1000 (AEST) Received: from cwcc.thunk.org (pool-72-74-133-215.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [72.74.133.215]) (authenticated bits=0) (User authenticated as tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU) by outgoing.mit.edu (8.14.7/8.12.4) with ESMTP id 18H0Yq0e016779 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 bits=256 verify=NOT); Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:34:53 -0400 Received: by cwcc.thunk.org (Postfix, from userid 15806) id 7D53715C0098; Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:34:52 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:34:52 -0400 From: "Theodore Ts'o" To: Dan Cross Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Subject: Re: [TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe) X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: TUHS main list , Douglas McIlroy Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 03:27:17PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote: > > > > I'm really not convinced trying to build distributed computing into > > the OS ala Plan 9 is viable. > > It seems like plan9 itself is an existence proof that this is possible. > What it did not present was an existence proof of its scalability and it > wasn't successful commercially. It probably bears mentioning that that > wasn't really the point of plan9, though; it was a research system. I should have been more clear. I'm not realliy convinced that building distributed computing into the OS ala Plan 9 is viable from the perspective of commercial success. Of course, Plan 9 did it; but it did it as a research system. The problem is that if a particular company is convinced that they want to use Yellow Pages as their directory service --- or maybe X.509 certificates as their authentication system, or maybe Apollo RPC is the only RPC system for a particularly opinionated site administrator --- and these prior biases disagree with the choices made by a particular OS that had distributed computing services built in as a core part of its functionality, that might be a reason for a particular customer *not* to deploy a particular distributed OS. Of course, this doesn't matter if you don't care if anyone uses it after the paper(s) about said OS has been published. > Plan 9, as just one example, asked a lot of questions about the issues you > mentioned above 30 years ago. They came up with _a_ set of answers; that > set did evolve over time as things progressed. That doesn't mean that those > questions were resolved definitively, just that there was a group of > researchers who came up with an approach to them that worked for that group. There's nothing stopping researchers from creating other research OS's that try to answer that question. However, creating an entire new local node OS from scratch is challenging[1], and then if you then have to recreate new versions of Kerberos, an LDAP directory server, etc., so they all of these functions can be tightly integrated into a single distributed OS ala Plan 9, that seems to be a huge amount of work, requiring a lot of graduate students to pull off. [1] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ (Page 14, Standards) > 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? Or is the argument that it's Linux's fault that Plan 9 has apparently failed to compete with it in the marketplace of ideas? And arguably, Plan 9 failed to make headway against Unix (and OSF/DCE, and Sun NFS, etc.) in the early to mid 90's, which is well before Linux's became popular, so that argument doesn't really make sense, either. - Ted