Post #572545

There was a really interesting talk at USENIX a few years ago (Usenix 21 keynote with Timothy Roscoe, I just looked it up) that was basically saying that a modern OS like linux, isn’t even accessing hardware and is just an OS in a system of OSs on a computer. This was indeed a very interesting talk. Not sure if the accusatory tone was warranted but I’m not really the target audience. One aspect that he only mentioned in passing is that hardware manufacturers seem to be very happy to entertain Linux’s (and Windows’) assumptions about memory, just like they seem to be very happy to entertain assumptions about execution order. Nobody wants to make hardware that requires a weird bespoke operating system because of its bespoke microarchitecture (except perhaps for Apple, though I’m not confident they’re really innovating in this regard). Maybe I lack perspective but I don’t really see a nice way out of this either, since nobody wants to buy hardware that requires weird bespoke operating systems either (except once again Apple). And I don’t see how an operating system could be widely supported across many different SoC designs without accumulating a similar complexity to modern Linux. We should definitely be feeling mildly uncomfortable about this entire thing though.