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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

The article is full of gold:

- OS's were designed for limited resources back in time. Now it's time to design something for unlimited resources.

- Attempting to retrofit a new security model to a current OS would require everything would be rewritten so we decided to rewrite an OS, which will require everything to be rewritten for it, including the OS this time.

- Sandboxing, local-scope FS access, user controlled permissions have never been done before, so we're doing those.

- Runtime analysis will give out better performance

- Compilers have always been hindered by OS design, so our new OS will break the barriers of compilers (finally! )

(and more!)

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When they say we no longer have to design for limited resources, I really want to know what we can gain from dropping that constraint.

Do I, as a user of the OS gain anything, or is it just easier for the kernel developers to not have to care about that?

> Do I, as a user of the OS gain anything, or is it just easier for the kernel developers to not have to care about that?

Even if you don't gain anything directly you still gain significantly indirectly. Improvements in the speed and quality of kernel development means end users see new features quicker and bugs fixed sooner. It also makes it easier for CS researchers to try things out and make large advancements that can be easily applied to the OS.

> Improvements in the speed...of kernel development means end users see new features quicker

When is the last time you needed a feature that could only be provided by your kernel?

> It also makes it easier for CS researchers to try things out

How are they going to try things out if your OS doesn't support any of the techniques they're interested in (i.e. novel ways of getting at hardware, novel ways of doing virtual memory, etc)? Your premise is that life will be better because we won't have to deal with the ugliness of talking directly to hardware in C/C++/assembler, so what room does that leave for research?

Also I just want to tag on a question based on one of your reddit posts:

> One example is that 3L can save the entire system as you are using it. This means that if the power gets cut or the battery dies you can (instantly) reboot the system and it will be like you never lost power.

You realize that this sort of thing is a huge area of current research, right? Because it's a really, really hard problem?

> When is the last time you needed a feature that could only be provided by your kernel?

Generally these are "unseen" features such as adding multicore support or adding support for a power saving feature on your graphics card.

> How are they going to try things out if your OS doesn't support any of the techniques they're interested in (i.e. novel ways of getting at hardware, novel ways of doing virtual memory, etc)

They are interested in a lot more than that. Check the 3L references page for a few examples. [0] Plus you can do many of those things with 3L.

> You realize that this sort of thing is a huge area of current research, right? Because it's a really, really hard problem?

Yes. But it is certainly possible and has already been done to some degree. Genera, for example, did it and a number of other real-world and research OSes have done it. Of course the real challenge is making it as real-time as possible but getting it most of the way there isn't actually that difficult.

[0] http://3lproject.org/references

The Desktop are like unlimited resources, that is true to a certain extent. But the design has been switched to Phones in recent years, and they are limited. And we will move to Watch soon, which is even more limited resources.

Not to mention we are bound by Battery technology. In that sense, we are still very limited in resources.

Very true. When it comes to the resource intensive development features in 3L they can actually be disabled. But also this is partially a bet on the future, a bet that hardware resources will continue to become less constrained at all levels. Of course that is not for sure when it comes to that but it seems more likely than not that we will continue to advance in some ways. It's important though to start work now so that we are ready when the time comes.

Regarding batteries, the real issue there is how often you wake up the hardware from low power states. An OS like 3L could actually control that better than what we have today and give us better battery life.

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