[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[John L. Bass]

"John L. Bass" <jbass at dmsd.com> writes:
> Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> writes:
> > > The advancement, would have been to put the energies which produced FreeBSD
> > > and Linux into a next generation redesign and architecture.
> 
> > In any case, I don't see what the big problem is.  The parts of Unix
> > design philosophy that work well should not be eliminated just for some
> > kind of ideological devotion to the idea of "advancement".  Meanwhile, a
> > lot of the new stuff showing up in projects like Plan 9 is being actively
> > incorporated into Unix-like OSes such as FreeBSD.
> 
> Sorry, but Plan 9 is one of the Dinasours too.

I probably should expand on this statement a bit, to provide a frame of reference.

By the mid 1980's most of us had already spent 10 years developing on and porting
UNIX to various architectures. I did the first port to the Zilog Z8002 for ONYX,
and later was active on three of the early M68K/M68020 teams/products, followed by
a host of other architectures/platforms as a UNIX internals and porting consultant.
We had the POSIX standard handed over to IEEE, and started reflecting on what to
do next. This includes the Bell Lab's guys, Ken, Dennis, Steve, and a number of
others (now part of Lucent) that did Plan 9.

Anyone that has read the Plan 9 documents, will note they clearly understood where
to start over, and that was throwing out all that was UNIX except for a few API's,
like basic POSIX interfaces.

They made an excellent research start at how to do next generation OS's very mindful
of what did and didn't work well in UNIX. There are some clear dated biases in their
design that are difficult to ignore ... it's completely character based, IE the system
has no native GUI support as a general and primary user interface.  In some ways,
I too can relate to that, having grown up a character command line guy for the last
40 years. It's primarily for this reason the OS is a dinasour, but not only for that
reason. It is EXCELLENT next generation research.

Anyone taking on the challenge of doing a next generation OS, really needs to read
and understand the design consideration of Plan 9, as you will clearly miss the ball
by thinking solely in the UNIX/FreeBSD/LInux frame of mind.

You also need to clearly understand the fundamentals of GUI based architectures, which
requires solid study of the Plato, Alto, Lisa, evolution of the Apple OS's, as well
as MSWin and X11/Gnome/KDE.

There are a number of other OS's that need to be explored as well, including Mach
(including Next OS and OS-X). The Next OS was a very interesting study into the
impacts of having an object oriented, message based OS internally. At MIT, besides
Mach, there are several other operating systems in their history that are a must
study ... especially Exokernel Operating System and previous microkernel work.

Only once you have explored other alternatives in detail, does it start to gel that
we can do much better than UNIX/FreeBSD/Linux ... and probably should have spent
at least the last decade expanding on this research, if not the last two decades.

John