UNIX was a terrific workhorse for its time, but eventually the old nag needs to be put out to pasture. David Chisnall argues that it's time to retire UNIX in favor of modern systems with a lot more horsepower. "UNIX has a lot of strengths, but like any other design it's starting to show its age. Some of the points listed in this article apply less to some UNIX-like systems, some apply more."
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Member since:2005-07-06
sure you cant change a monolithic kernel into a microkernel. but replacing one kernel for another dont change the overall unix philosophy. where does it say that a unix have to have a monolithic kernel?
didnt debian start releasing debian hurd distros a year or two ago? most of the distro was basicly the linux distro but with a new kernel and some new kernel tools, right?
again, its evolution, but inside the unix parameters.
to me it sounds like the author wants to trow away unix concepts, something totaly diffrent then trowing away code and binarys. ie, replace the code, maintain the ideas.
so in my view plan9 is basicly unix, only that its a unix for the workstation age by the looks of it.
give linux fuse and you will see that some smart coder makes a plugin that allows a user to see and control his prosesses using a mount under his home dir and so on. this is one of the few things that right now are not exposed as part of the file system and therefor breaks with the basic unix idea of everything is a file.
still, it boils down to what one see as evolution vs what one see as revolution.
hmm, it would be interesting to have the diffrent windows of a desktop exposed as files so that one could in theory pipe the content of one over into the other 
like say: cat windows1 > window2
question is, what would be piped over, and in what sequence...
Member since:
"in the end it comes down to evolution rather then revolution. take what works and then replace what does not. this is whats happening on both bsds and linux, and is a great strength in my view. "
are you sure? I don't agree with all points of the author, but it may be necessary that UNIX *has* to be completely replaced/rewritten in the long term in order to achieve new goals. This doesn't mean one has to abandon all good properties of Unix.
For example, it seems to be nearly impossible to transform a monolithic kernel into a microkernel. Regardig stability, security and (possibly) scalability over multiple nodes, microkernels could be the superiour solution. Even MS seems to realize this now (see Singularity) and their new approach stands in stark contrast to the Windows/NT...-kernel line (which is obviously even much more bloated than Unix(-like)-kernels, as it includes parts of the GUI).