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

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 03:27:17PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> >
> > I'm really not convinced trying to build distributed computing into
> > the OS ala Plan 9 is viable.
> 
> It seems like plan9 itself is an existence proof that this is possible.
> What it did not present was an existence proof of its scalability and it
> wasn't successful commercially. It probably bears mentioning that that
> wasn't really the point of plan9, though; it was a research system.

I should have been more clear.  I'm not realliy convinced that
building distributed computing into the OS ala Plan 9 is viable from
the perspective of commercial success.  Of course, Plan 9 did it; but
it did it as a research system.

The problem is that if a particular company is convinced that they
want to use Yellow Pages as their directory service --- or maybe X.509
certificates as their authentication system, or maybe Apollo RPC is
the only RPC system for a particularly opinionated site administrator
--- and these prior biases disagree with the choices made by a
particular OS that had distributed computing services built in as a
core part of its functionality, that might be a reason for a
particular customer *not* to deploy a particular distributed OS.

Of course, this doesn't matter if you don't care if anyone uses it
after the paper(s) about said OS has been published.

> Plan 9, as just one example, asked a lot of questions about the issues you
> mentioned above 30 years ago. They came up with _a_ set of answers; that
> set did evolve over time as things progressed. That doesn't mean that those
> questions were resolved definitively, just that there was a group of
> researchers who came up with an approach to them that worked for that group.

There's nothing stopping researchers from creating other research OS's
that try to answer that question.  However, creating an entire new
local node OS from scratch is challenging[1], and then if you then
have to recreate new versions of Kerberos, an LDAP directory server,
etc., so they all of these functions can be tightly integrated into a
single distributed OS ala Plan 9, that seems to be a huge amount of
work, requiring a lot of graduate students to pull off.

[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/   (Page 14, Standards)

> What's changed is that we now take for granted that Linux is there, and
> we've stopped asking questions about anything outside of that model.

It's unclear to me that Linux is blamed as the reason why researchers
have stopped asking questions outside of that model.  Why should Linux
have this effect when the presence of Unix didn't?

Or is the argument that it's Linux's fault that Plan 9 has apparently
failed to compete with it in the marketplace of ideas?  And arguably,
Plan 9 failed to make headway against Unix (and OSF/DCE, and Sun NFS,
etc.) in the early to mid 90's, which is well before Linux's became
popular, so that argument doesn't really make sense, either.

						- Ted