Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch
sdtimes.com
sdtimes.com
Not one of the "base it on Linux or BSD" comments gets it. This whole thing is MSR saying, "look, we got it wrong, and so did everyone else. It's not just about one computer anymore."
Sure, they're fixing up the way system resources are exposed and planning to make the whole OS more fault tolerant, but the key takeaway is that the whole OS is network aware. Apps can discover storage, processors, memory, and other resources on the local trusted network, and use them without caring at all that they might be on different machines.
Try getting a single apache or IIS instance to run on 50 servers in a cluster, without writing all of the distribution logic in the application. Sure you could separately configure a local instance on each node, and set up file syncronization or network storage, and...
Why federate your database when you could just add another node to the OS cluster, thereby increasing the resources available to the single DB instance?
The goal is to get all the infrastucture work for free.
I hope someone, anyone, can pull this off. As a developer of a distributed app, let me tell you, the bar right now is WAY too high, and current operating systems, be they Windows or Linux are not up to the task.
[Edit: slashes caused unintentional italics]
It sounds to me like they're taking Erlang concepts to the next level and baking them into the fundamental architecture of the OS.
If you want better security, unfortunately you have to roll it yourself. You could write a message router that tunnels Erlang messages over TCP, and apply some sort of authentication process to that.
Erlang applications that are exposed to the Internet do not allow Erlang connections from the outside, but rather implement a custom socket protocol and only use Erlang distribution internally.
I hear that they're planning on adding better security in future versions, but I don't know any details about that.
WHY???? the whole point of the web server is to be a stateless middleware broker. do these fifty servers now have one virtual port 80? do all fifty need to be restarted on a config change? the premise of one web server running on a cluster makes no sense
i can saturate an outbound gb ethernet connection with apache on one box. what are the other 49 supposed to be doing????
Vista took 6 years starting out as a "complete rewrite" with ambitious features that were pared away one by one to leave little more than a facelift for Windows XP. Don't get me wrong - I hope Microsoft is able to pull this off - but I don't hold out high hopes.
Also, relax. It'd be great if an OS team made something that was technically interesting. Everyone, regardless of whether or not you use their implementation, benefits from their research.
I've been confused about why anyone, especially in the (relatively enlightened) programmer crowd, would want Microsoft to succeed at just about anything anymore.
Haven't they tried their darndest to prove they really are evil quite a few times already?
They've basically held back the development of the Internet for many years now, and were most likely planning some kind of world-wide DRM-enslavement with Vista.
If Vista doesn't add much compared to XP, why would you suppose it took such a long time to develop?
OOXML? -Bribing countries/companies to let it pass, anyone?
There was a time when IBM was the evil empire. For all we know it will be Apple next, with some sort of thin client lock-in based on safari and itunes.
Genuine innovation is a good thing even when it comes from unpopular origins.
It seems to me the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' is winning (and indeed during that discussion they were in the early stages of winning), but that Microsoft's reputation as a whole keeps going down since that time.
People used to like windows because it just worked, and ran all their favorite software. The more they make it harder for people to do that, the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch.
Apple & Linux have merely started to nibble at their bread crumbs ... maybe if Win7 screws up, then they'll start to eat Microsoft's lunch.
In front of me were a couple of teenyboppers with no idea what the iPhone even cost (and didn't much care, their parents picked up the tab). Behind me was a DJ who knew every tidbit of iPhone gossip imaginable, definitely a hard-core Apple fan.
That the teenyboppers showed up tells me that it is something more than just a "cult of personality" that attracts Apple fans. It hits consumer culture in just the right spot to be a mass market hit.
And between them, Apple and the swarm of open source operating systems have nibbled away a couple of extremely key markets. Name me a field where intense concentrated utilisation of computing resources happens in a mostly Windows environment. Most of the industrial computing environments run on some form of free unix-like OS for some very good reasons. And industrial computing (whether Google, Amazon, rackspace or what have you) is the growth segment of the technology industry at this time.
Windows may own the desktop still, but the desktop is a relatively saturated segment of the market. And most of the sales are replacements, not new seats.
And please don't just dismiss me as a Microsoft hater, I know some very smart people who work there and I do not underestimate the capability or creativity that can come out of the company when it comes down to the wire. But as one of the people I know there said to me a couple of years back "Inside microsoft there are about a hundred world class software companies, most of which are working against each other."
I think MS is a little behind on this, but only a little. Still I hope they don't ditch the Windows brand name, it's clearly one of the most successful of all time. Isn't midori a watermelon liqueur?
Also virtualization isn't about Microsoft's products, they'll just write new ones for any new OSes. It's about the legacy code businesses everywhere run on.
time and the trends are on their side. google docs shows the possibility. once web systems evolve to better handle these type of apps, the advantage will play to them more and more
I'm not sure what you mean by "web systems", but if you mean browsers/standards they're moving at far too slow pace to assume any impact at all on anything ever. And even if they advance, there's a lag until people adopt them. A large percentage of people still use IE6, so any business model built on "web systems" unavailable until IE9 is so far off as to be not worth discussing.
its not a cliche. people are making real money. microsoft should be concerned
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india...
It's probably doing even better today.
In particular it goes into "IE8 and web standards"
opensolaris - they can't even give it away
honestly, who has dropped linux or freebsd for opensolaris?
this is a cautionary tale for MS - no one will care about your new os
Of course, if things turn out really well and there is a strong business case then there is every reason to think it would be adopted. But what clearly won't happen is what people are prediction (hoping?) elsewhere in this thread, that work will be poured into this and the ambitiousness of this project will cause Windows to be delayed. If this never sees the light of day than the actual Windows team will just keep on chugging along at whatever their plan A is.
Good luck to the team playing with the concept.
The only thing that puzzles me is that they're building it all from scratch instead of at least basing it on an existing O/S OS like Mac OS X did.
You can lock in users via incompatibility and an inferior product... but Apple tried that back in the 90's with not much luck.
Singularity is really exciting. There are some big potential efficiency gains with this kind of OS. The biggest one is in reducing the number of context switches performed by the computer. A context switch is when the OS replaces the CPU's registers, saving the current values and reading in new ones. This takes time and can push application data out of the cache. With current OS's, every kernel call results in two expensive context switches. One to enter kernel mode and another to return to the application. In Singularity, an application's call into the OS shouldn't require a context switch.
Much has changed since then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
Started in 1969. Even Multics wasn't started until 1964.
Look, the OSVs only choices are Windows and Ubuntu. Ain't no one going to try to sell Ubuntu to Enterprise Rent A Car (pick your old school, massive install of choice).
I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be. Microsoft has a bunch of really smart people sitting in Research working on this stuff.
Just think how cool this will be if they make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X, and Apple made that jump with far less resources.
whatever will be "game changing" in 2012, my guess is that it won't be a new version of windows, or any other desktop os
make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X
yeah that was about the time apple nearly went under. how soon people forget
But you're right in so far that Microsoft's all-important "legacy" stuff is by now so old it can easily be run in virtualization or even in emulation, so they're probably on the right track.
What about the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface?
What about cloud computing (as stated in the article)?
What about the future of the internet (call it web 3.0 or whatever)?
Looking at the timeline of operating systems and "game changing" improvements, I would imagine that it will continue to grow exponentially as it has been for the last ~30 years. Microsoft, Apple and Linux all have a great chance in contributing to these advances.
do i need to buy win7 to use this?
What about cloud computing
plays to the strengths of linux, not windows
What about the future of the internet
MOBILE. steve jobs is right on this one and msft will end up having an even larger "skunk works" project to try to catch the iphone
Windows runs the world. I'm sorry I know the internet is hosted on a lot of Linix servers but in small, medium and large businesses there a LOT of windows servers keeping everything running.
Please keep dreaming happy dreams. In our great nation this is still something that's legal.
alas, this is microsoft we're talking about. so the first version will be called "my little operating system" or something, and they'll find plenty of ways to screw it up.
if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on to it, call it mibdori and ship it
the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later, but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with something else altogether.
look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in the long-term.
i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.
Never underestimate what a crazy marketing department with a budget of hundreds of millions can do.
It was also short-sighted; that's not a sustainable way to go forward, because every one of those custom patches increases the maintenance overhead of your code, and it's not already stellar quality code, you're going to be in trouble... and MS was the epitome of the sweatshop, so there's no way that they had much if any good code floating around there.
Lately however, the other side has been gaining ground, leading to things like dotNET. They've willingly sacrificed backward compatibility in so far limited ways, which is a start in the right direction, IMO.
Since this project is in MS Research, it has a shot, but I suspect that if it were part of the standard development process at MS, it would take 90+ years, based on the story of the guy that wrote the start menu for Vista...
I think you're right; no matter what they do with the brand, I agree about windows. I don't think that they have as much time as they'd like, especially if Apple decides to get aggressive and teams up with Dell or PowerNotebooks or Boxx and starts expanding its OS marketing to take on Vista directly...
It goes along the following lines: The only good thing about MS Win. are the ubiquitous driver support and secondly their programming API (since 90% of the desktop code + office + ... etc... depend on those APIs). However the rest (ie. the kernel, the gui, especially the kernel) suck. Therefore, the right thing to do is to trash the kernel and just use something else. It would be pretty easy for MS to write a compatibility layer for their drivers to say... the linux kernel (if we don't care about drivers, I would actually use FreeBSD as it is more stable and secure). Since, their compatibility layer does not include any major portion of the kernel and can be considered a separate module under the GPL (Nvidia and ATI do something like this already so it works), they can lock up the source to their pleasure and charge $150/license from us (and like $3/license from Dell et al.) and still make their nice cushy profits. Think ndiswrapper on steroids. You plug in the compat layer, point it to the Win32 drivers and magic: devices work. This works for MS. As shown, they still geto to make their cushy profits and get their lock in monopoly. If they do the same to their APIs on the app side, they can control the office market as well. It works for all those servers and stuff because they get to use the FreeBSD kernel with all the stability and server goodness that comes with it and it works for me because i take the compat layer, stick FreeBSD on top of it and happily go on bash-ing away this time with full driver support.
Furthermore, the compat layer and API layers are relatively thin with (hopefully) none of the really complex stuff like VM management, file systems, and CPU schedulers so it should be much much easier for MS to push out good code (they could even cut down their development budget and make even more money). Happy faces all around.
wait for the concessions and half-baked reversals. they're obsessing with a whole new kernel, that will likely be the first decision to get dumped as they watch MSFT drift down to 18 with no new product on deck to rally sales.
then having ditched the "rewrite" plan, they will spend a year spinning their wheels trying to locate the best two or three ideas from midori to graft on to vista, people might just jump to mobile platforms full-time, or the console market might start seriously eating into pc sales, or everyday people start using ubuntu, etc etc etc.
the market just isn't going to stand still for five years while microsoft tries to relearn how to build big systems. microsoft is chasing google, they are chasing apple, they are chasing oracle, they are chasing nintendo, they are chasing linux....
its going to be fun watching this company feign relevance while going the way of DEC
Of course at some point someone is going to invent something better than Unix. Who knows, maybe it will be Microsoft (haha... you never know). But I think they would ultimately stand to be more successful if they didn't have to keep reinventing TCP/IP stacks and filesystems and could focus on something a little higher level.