[PLUG] What Comes After Unix?

Tyrell Jentink tyrell at jentink.net
Thu Sep 13 15:17:08 UTC 2018


I'm a young'n; I don't remember 4.4BSD or Research UNIX... I also come to
Linux from an IT background, not a Computer Science background, and maybe I
lack a certain historical perspective as a consequence.

I was recently reading an article that claimed Linux is insecure, because
of it's monolithic kernel codebase:
https://threatpost.com/researchers-blame-monolithic-linux-code-base-for-critical-vulnerabilities/136785/


That lead me down a trail of research on Wikipedia, trying to figure out
what they meant by that...  And I discovered a number of interesting things:

First, Many are likening it to a modern incarnation of the
Tanenbaun-Torvalds debates of the early '90s, which are also fascinating
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate

But also, UNIX itself is old hat: Research Unix was a 1960s and 70's
approach to operating mainframes... By the 80's, Bell Labs had grown bored,
and wanted to start playing with distributed systems on commodity PCs, and
they started a new project, Plan 9 From Bell Labs (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs); They doubled down
on the "Everything is a file, Programs should be small, and APIs should be
text based" philosophies... And they created the 9P2000 file sharing
protocol to share all of these "All resources are files" resources with
other computers... They also ignored existing standards, and had no
patience for existing software... It's still around, in the form of a
forked project called 9FRONT, http://9front.org. Fair warning: If you think
*BSD people are rude, these guys are worse in that they are also big fans
of sarcasm and irony... Rumor has it that new users regularly leave the IRC
crying...

9P2000 is still around, too, as the V9FS on Linux and many Unix like
operating systems, and growing popular in VM communities,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol)

Then Bell Labs grew bored again... And in the 90's, built Inferno (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) ), a system
built from lessons learned on Plan 9 From Bell Labs, but featuring a VM not
unlike Java; In fact, it can recompile Java bytecode to run natively.
Inferno is still around, developed by a third party:
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

Both Plan 9 From Bell Labs and Inferno featured Microkernel technologies...
And in the '90s, Computer Science nerds grew obsessed over microkernels,
and born was the L4 microkernel architecture (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family); They never say so,
but one can see many design similarities between all of the microkernels
and the earlier Plan 9/Inferno experiments.

Where many like to argue that "Linux isn't an OS without GNU,"
microkernels are even less an OS than Linux... in that it doesn't even
directly manage user rights or block devices or network routing... All of
that gets built as servers running in userspace, and THIS is the security
the original article was citing: By getting all that complicated and
potentially buggy software out of the kernel, the kernel can then protect
from the faulty code, and UNIX like operating systems can be built on top.

Another project, Genode (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode), aims to
add all the services needed to build more of the supporting framework of an
OS, I think of L4+Genode as being analogous to Linux; And a third, SculptOS
(https://genode.org/download/sculpt), to make it all a usable desktop OS,
akin to GNU/Linux.

SculptOS isn't a Unix system per se, and they are quick to say so in their
documentation, but they do use familiar tools as a convenient interface to
the system... Like Bash and VIM.

SculptOS is actually pretty cool, in that they achieved "General Purpose
OS" status by paravirtualizing Linux itself on top of the L4 kernel...
Think of it as GNU/Linux/L4 (GNU on Linux on L4), or something... I'm still
learning, too. There is a slight performance hit, but at 4%, it is
significantly less than a fully virtualized operating system... I think it
would be cool to run Windows and Linux side-by-side, each with only
marginal performance costs, and each running as a user service...

The guys over at ReactOS dismiss L4 as "Just a Hypervisor," but I think
they are missing the big picture... This is opening the door to running
entire operating systems as services next to each other... It's like
Docker, but with WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEMS!

I'm pretty excited... It's like taking my computer from a timeline where
the world stopped evolving in the 1960s, to something... A bit more
adventurous.

At least... It feels that way on paper... And so far, I'm living on paper,
LOL.

Of course... This entire history lesson ignores Mach, which is the
Microkernel under Mac OS and GNU/Hurd, and that might be interesting, too,
if GNU/Hurd weren't developing inside a drum of molasses in the Arctic...

Anyone else playing with any of these "next generation" operating systems?

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 05:25 Richard Owlett <rowlett at cloud85.net> wrote:

> On 09/12/2018 05:50 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 04:03:33PM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >> Where should I go looking?
> >
> > http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> >
>
> Haven't been referred there in quite awhile ;/
>
> A more prosaic subject line might have been:
>   "When/Why use a wiki? An alternative?"
>
> Perhaps deleting two sentences from the body would have reduced noise.
>
> It could have read:
> "My underlying problem is OS independent. However, I seek a Linux
> oriented solution. My language of choice does have a wiki. HOWEVER,
> anyone can modify anything at any time without immediate checks/balances."
>
> For detailed questions I participate in ~40 mailing lists and USENET
> groups. I've yet to find any web based fora which I can navigate.
>
> I mention wikis as I look for background. Wikipedia is well written but
> to broadly aimed. Arch wiki is well written and easily navigated but is
> narrowly focused.
>
> Overall, I still like my original subject line,
>     "To wiki or not to wiki. THAT is the question."
> over the more prosaic
>      "When/Why use a wiki? An alternative?"
>
> Thank you.
>
>
>
>
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