wogna

> “If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet community, it’s got to be good,”

How comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS Mail,X.400,etc.) into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant messaging in particular) failed?

How realistic is it to run processes of this OS (like the netstack processes) on top of existing microkernels like minix/QNX/etc. ?

Why is the tcp socket set to busy poll for 1 microsecond?

> ICMP is dangerous, and needs to be blocked

I've fought this argument countless times and lost. Not being able to ping a server, check for "destination unreachable" messages, etc. leads to frustrating troubleshooting sessions.

Small additions here: the networking components of QNX moved to kernel space quite some time ago, I don't even know if io-net is still supported. As far as I know they've reused the NetBSD stack for performance reasons. Also, those 60KB gives you a bare-bones system that is far from what people expect a POSIX system to be; you'd have to add plenty of additional processes to get there.

I still have a soft spot for QNX though; I hope they'll survive RIM.

For my job I had the opportunity to work with quite some OSI standards on top of TCP/IP (X.216, X.227 and X.500, X.400 as application layers). My experience is quite in line with the common critique: most of these standards add more overhead than they're worth. It was also quite hard to bend these protocols into our use case (when bandwidth comes at a premium, it doesn't take long before the customer starts complaining).

I don't really see how a "dumb terminal" is a noteworthy feature of OSI? That's essentially what telnet does, and it too can just piggyback on top of TCP (probably the only protocol that makes use of all TCP flags available).

True that, but I was talking about the POSIX async I/O API: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/aio.... I don't know much about the LinuxThreads-era.

But that's the thing: places which fit those requirements usually run some IBM solution (AS/400 and the likes). I've never encountered VMS in production before, so I'm really curious to some concrete examples of companies using it.

Could you elaborate on how it did things better than the common cluster file systems of today? (OCFS2, Hadoop, Ceph, etc.)

Could you give an example of such an industry? VMS to me has always been that OS that everyone claimed to be better than UNIX-likes, but none could explain why.

That's not really a fair comparison: Windows I/O completion ports are a proprietary standard that is part of the NT kernel, while POSIX AIO is just a user-space libc extension that was added later on (as far as I know, none of the kernel-space posix AIO proposals got merged in). It's easier to get things right when you defined your own standards, at the cost of portability.

But even then, you might argue that that completion ports are less than ideal: you incur a lot of complexity in the file system drivers, while e.g. solaris/BSD offer similar functionality without that burden.

I'm not familiar with BeOS at all, but browsing through Haiku's API documentation I can't really find much. What exactly were you referring to?