Comment by Solar19

7 years ago

This is interesting, and to some extent, expected. I'd expect that emulating one OS on top of another is going to have performance challenges and constraints in general.

But the deep dive into aspects of Windows and Linux I/O reminded me that I'd love to see a new generation of clean sheet operating systems. Not another Unix-like OS. Not Windows. Something actually new and awesome. It's been a long time since Unix/BSD, Linux, and Windows NT/XP were introduced.

A few years ago, Microsoft developed a new operating system called Midori, but sadly they killed it. MS, Apple, and Google are each sitting on Carl Sagan money – billions and billions in cash. Would it hurt MS to spend a billion to build an awesome, clean-sheet OS? They could still support and update Windows 10 for as many years as they deemed optimal for their business, while also offering the new OS.

Would it cost more than a billion dollars to assemble an elite team of a few hundred people to build a new OS? Would Apple, Microsoft, or Google notice the billion dollar cost? Or even two billion?

If you think there's no point in a new OS, oh I think there's a lot of room for improvement right now. For one thing, we really ought to have Instant Computing in 2018. Just about everything we do on a computer should be instant, like 200 ms, maybe 100 ms. Opening an application and having it be fully ready for further action should be instant. Everything we do in an application should be instant, except for things like video transcoding or compressing a 1 GiB folder. OSes today are way, way too slow, which comes back to the file access performance issue on Windows. Even a Mac using a PCIe SSD fails to be instant for all sorts of tasks. They're all too damn slow.

We also need a fundamentally new security model. There's no way data should be leaving a user's computer as freely and opaquely as is the case now with all consumer OSes. Users should have much more control and insight into data leaving their machine. A good OS should also differentiate actual human users from software – the user model on nix is inadequate. Computers should be able to know when an action or authorization was physically committed by a human. That's just basic, and we don't have it. And I'm just scratching the surface of how much better security could be on general purpose OSes. There's so much more we could do.

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Solar19

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013a  7 years ago

Google is doing this, very publicly, with Fuchsia. Brand new kernel, not even POSIX compliant.

Microsoft is also doing this, in a different and substantially more expensive way [1]. Over the past several years they've been rewriting and unifying their disparate operating systems (Windows, Phone (before the fall), Xbox, etc) into a single modular kernel they're calling OneCore. Its more than likely that this work is based off of, if not totally contains, much of the NT kernel, but its the same line of thinking.

There is one massive rule when it comes to engineering management we see repeated over and over, yet no one listens: Do Not Rewrite. Period.

Apple is exemplary in this. We don't know how many changes they've made to iOS since its fork from MacOS long ago, which was based on BSD even longer ago. But have you used an iPad in recent history? Instant app starts. No lag. No-stutter rendering at 120fps. When HFS started giving them issues, they swapped it out with APFS. Apps are sandboxed completely from one-another, and have no way to break their sandbox even if the user wants them to. Etc. Comparing an iPad Pro's performance to most brand new Windows laptops is like fighting a low-orbit laser cannon with a civil war era musket. They've succeeded, however they managed to do that.

Point being, you don't rewrite. You learn, you adapt, and you iterate. We'll get there.

(And if you've read all this and then wondered "but isn't Fucshia a rewrite" you'd be right, and we should all have serious concerns about that OS ever seeing the light of day on a real product, and its quality once that happens. It won't be good. They can't even release a passable ChromeOS device [2])

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOh6d_r63Bw

blago  7 years ago

> Would it cost more than a billion dollars to assemble an elite team of a few hundred people to build a new OS? Would Apple, Microsoft, or Google notice the billion dollar cost? Or even two billion?

It's not a matter of money, resources, or talent. For reference: The Mythical Man-Month, waterfall process, Windows Vista.

Building something of this scale and complexity from scratch will take a lot longer than even the most conservative estimate and will take many more years to shake out the bugs. Again, remember Windows Vista? And that was not nearly as revolutionary as the things you suggest.

maccam94  7 years ago

I think the biggest problem is building the application ecosystem. iOS and Android were able to attract developers because they were the first movers on the computer phone platform. Convincing people to use a new OS for desktop (or any existing) computing without any apps would be difficult, and vice-versa convincing devs to support a platform with no users is also tough.

  • Solar19  7 years ago

    I think it's actually much easier now to get people on a new OS then it was a decade ago, or in the 90s, or the 80s. The web is so centric that a new OS with a great browser has won half the battle (I could write five pages on how massively better a browser could be than Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. and I love Firefox and Opera and Vivaldi and Brave.)

    ChromeOS has partly proved the point, especially among college students and younger. Anyway, a serious effort at a new OS, a whole new stack, along with a new office suite and other applications, could succeed with the right (large) team and funding. People aren't very loyal to Microsoft – they're not loved. And Apple users have no idea how much better computers could be, but they would if someone showed them.

Aloha  7 years ago

We built something like this once, AS/400, checks off many of the boxes you mentioned.

gerdesj  7 years ago

Would it cost more than a billion dollars to assemble an elite team of a few hundred people to build a new OS? Would Apple, Microsoft, or Google notice the billion dollar cost? Or even two billion?

This gives some idea of what is required to keep Linux moving forward. It would be nice if we could see similar stats for MS and Apple.

https://lwn.net/Articles/767635/

mycall  7 years ago

> I'd love to see a new generation of clean sheet operating systems. > We also need a fundamentally new security model.

Have you looked at Genode/seL4?

gjs278  7 years ago

raid1 a compresssd ramdisk to your OS drive and everything basically is instant