[TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[Tony Finch]

Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm curious about other peoples' thoughts on the talk and the overall topic?

I saw this talk yesterday and I twote some off-the-cuff thoughts
(https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1433004863818960898):

I wanted to hear more about the problem of closed firmware (Roscoe's
research platform uses OpenBMC). I hope the gradual rise of open firmware
will help to fix the problem of platform management controllers treating
the OS as the enemy.

The talk focuses on Linux because ~everything runs Linux, but Linux was
designed for a platform that was defined by Intel and Microsoft, and the
disfunctional split that Roscoe points out is exactly the split in design
responsibilities between Intel and Microsoft. In the Arm world the split
has been reproduced, but with Arm and the SoC manufacturers instead of
Intel and the PC clones, and Linux instead of Windows.

There’s also Conway’s law, “you ship your org chart”, and in this case
Roscoe is talking about the organisation of the computer industry as a
whole. So if someone comes up with a better OS architecture, is the
implied org chart also successful under capitalism?

(end paste)

I suppose the historical perspective would be to ask if the way that OS
and driver software was developed in the past in vertically-integratewd
companies can provide insight into the hardware complexity of today's
systems...

Tony.
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