[COFF] Other OSes?

[Dan Cross]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2018 at 1:43 AM Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> [snip some very interesting and insightful comments]
> Mill ideas are very much worth exploring.  It will be possible
> to build highly secure systems with it -- if it ever gets
> sufficiently funded and built!  IMHO layers of mapping as with
> virtualization/containerization are not really needed for
> better security or isolation.
>

Sure, with emphasis on that "if it ever gets sufficiently funded and
built!" part. :-) It sounds cool, but what to do on extant hardware?
Similarly with CHERI: they change nearly everything (including the
hardware).

> 2. Is mmap() *really* the best we can do for mapping arbitrary resources
> > into an address space?
>
> I think this is fine.  Even remote objects mmapping should
> work!
>

Sure, but is it the *best* we can do? Subjectively, the interface is pretty
ugly, and we're forced into a multi-level store. Maybe that's OK; it sure
seems like we haven't come up with anything better. But I wonder whether
that's because we've found some local maxima in our pursuit of
functionality vs cost, or because we're so stuck in the model of
multi-level stores and mapping objects into address spaces that we can't
see beyond it. And it sure would be nice if the ergonomics of the
programming interface were better.

> 3. A more generalized message passing system would be cool. Something
> where
> > you could send a message with a payload somewhere in a synchronous way
> > would be nice (perhaps analogous to channels). VMS-style mailboxes would
> > have been neat.
>
> Erlang. Carl Hewitt's Actor model has this.
>
> [1]
> http://tierra.aslab.upm.es/~sanz/cursos/DRTS/AlphaRtDistributedKernel.pdf


I'm going to read that paper, but it's at least a couple of decades old
(one of the authors is affiliated with DEC).

        - Dan C.
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