Scott Finley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ported the Linux files system Ext2 to Microsoft's new research operating system Singularity. One of the most striking observations was the author's comments on Singularity's robustness. "Perhaps the best testament to Singularity's dependability was the extremely good system stability during the development of ext2... If the ext2 process terminated as the result of a failure, it only resulted in open channels closing. Other processes could (and did) recover gracefully." Finley's report details all his findings quite extensively.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I'm not a Plan9 expert but I think that those workspace you're talking about used the hardware memory manager to enforce separation whereas Singularity's distinct point is to use software to enforce the separation which has the advantage of faster communication (no need to change the TLB configuration) and the disadvantage that the software which can be used are limited: no C, no assembly language.
Also if I understood well in Singularity the communication channel between processes having some kind of FSM which manage the states, which prevent for example one process flooding the other.
Of course there are drawbacks: the paper showed that the worst-case latency for reading was severely impacted by the GC (orders of magnitude bigger), so this wouldn't be a good choice for real time system (though usage of HDD is usually limited in many real-time system).
Member since:
2007-04-11
...in layman's terms the difference twixt Plan 9 and Singularity. AFAIR Plan 9 ran everything as seperate independent workspaces, didnt it? Is this similar or different to singularity's independent processes?
I cant seem to find, after a quick google, a decent succinct comparison/contrast between the two
(if not, maybe the question will stimulate some discussion!?!)
Edited 2008-07-22 15:28 UTC