It seems like Microsoft Research is really busy these days with research operating systems. We had Singularity, a microkernel operating system written in managed code, and late last week we were acquainted with Barrelfish, a "multikernel" system which treats a multicore system as a network of independent cores, using ideas from distributed systems. Now, we have a third contestant, and it's called Helios.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2008-08-25
Member since:2009-05-06
Plan 9's failure makes me feel like crying. It's how Unix should have gone, everything still being a file. These days most Unixs have bits bolted on that ignore that's it's a Unix system. They only look at that part in isolation, not how it fits with the whole. Simplicity before optimal, because what's optimal today might not be tomorrow and what might be optimal in isolation might not be when taken as a whole. Micro optimization rather than macro optimization. On top of that, simplicity isn't just easier to use but to maintain. When Unix was young, it really was everything through a simple/generic abstraction (i.e. file) in a single naming system (filesystem) that all tools could work with. ALSA and Pulse is what we have now in Linux, where as we should have something like OSSv4 and a X Audio plugin (which is also done (http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/murx/xaudio/) , but unloved). And we have seperate API to use sockets, where as on Plan9 there was the /net folder with sockets as files. Glendix wouldn't be enough to get Linux up the Plan9 design, it needs come from Linus and the kernel itself.
Member since:2005-07-06
The Glendix folks are hoping to get their Plan 9 compatibility features integrated into mainline Linux if possible. It wouldn't fix the non-file-like APIs but it would mean that some of the nice Plan 9 APIs (e.g. the pseudo filesystems for various things) become available to Linux applications too. Assuming they get any of it upstreamed!
Even if it's just a reasonably clean set of patches that distributors and / or uses could apply that would still be useful.
Member since:
2006-10-18
It kind of sounds like "Singularity meets Plan 9".