The Microsoft Singularity 615
jose parinas writes ""Microsoft Research has published the first details of a wholly new operating system under development called Singularity, designed new from the ground up, built on a new language and designed with emphasis on dependability instead of performance.""
Except that (Score:3, Interesting)
Google cache (Score:2, Interesting)
I hacked on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:another longhorn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Research is always making things Microsoft never uses. Remember all the 3D navigator stuff they were crowing about years ago?
I think Microsoft Research is a place to keep eggheads working and happy so they don't go working somewhere else.
that's different (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:another longhorn? (Score:3, Interesting)
CP/M. Some device specific OS's like the C64. The Apple Lisa (which begat the MacOS 1-9). I'm not even sure I'd count Unix, since there's so many flavors all based on something from before. Even Linux was heavily dependant on GNU, which pre-existed it.
Look at the failures. BeOS. Rhapsody. Plan 9, etc.
Re:My guess: (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the paper, the idea is that, yes, it'll be slower, but the reliability will be built in from the beginning, rather than other systems which take something fast and bolt reliability on. They make a good point that they will be able to use optimising compilers for CLR languages in this context, too.
Re:another longhorn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Papers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft: ActiveX considered harmful (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they're saying that the OS should only run software from the original developers and never be enhanced by anyone else - ESPECIALLY anything that could remotely be considered "open source."
In other words, users must only run Microsoft Windows - and stop asking us for updates and security patches because updates and patches are not reliable or secure.
In other words, give us your money and shut the fuck up.
Oh, yeah, this project has Bill's seal of approval on it, all right.
These are the sort of "brilliant guys" Microsoft hires - people with no fucking clue who accept the Microsoft way of doing things.
The concepts mentioned, by the way, are 180 degrees opposite of mine: an application should just be one more thing the OS knows how to do. In other words, total integration of OS and applications by requiring the application to be developed in the same manner as the OS as - not an extension - but an integration with the OS.
Not possible without an OS with conceptual processing ability, however.
Re:another longhorn? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're ignoring the fact that the relationship was Dave Cutler, and 20 of his team members.
a respected former DEC engineer who worked on later versions of VMS, being the primary designer of the original NT kernel, and using many of the same ideas (as you'd expect him to do.)
The story actually goes much farther than that. You see, when Cutler was working at DEC, he was pushing a complete rewrite of the VMS Operating System. His new version of the OS would have all kinds of neato features that no one had ever seen before. DEC gave him the go-ahead and development commenced. After the project had gotten far along, DEC decided to pull the plug on it, and moved Cutler elsewhere. Cutler (predictably) quit.
Microsoft then sapped up Cutler on the agreement that Microsoft would also hire all the team members who'd been working on the Next-Gen VMS project with him. Microsoft agreed, and development on "Windows NT" (which doesn't actually mean anything, the marketdriods just liked the "NT" letters) began in earnest.
DEC eventually found out about the whole thing, and wanted to sue. However, an agreement was reached to where Windows NT would run on Digital Alpha hardware. DEC *thought* they got a good deal (all the technology, none of the development costs) but didn't realize quite the deal they were getting into. The Alpha version of NT worked, but absolutely no one targetted software to it. Oops.
Some people, as you appear to suggest, have chosen to go further than this and claim there's code from VMS in NT.
It's irrelevant if that is true or not. (Though it might be, given the amount of resources directly transferred to Microsoft.) What's relevant is the fact that each engineer carried a metric boatload of proprietary technology to another company. That's simply not legal for employees, especially when they're under contract. Thus Microsoft benefitted from all the work that DEC had already paid for.
As for the similar naming scheme, I had to chuckle at that. I had never read the Windows NT Magazine article on this until just now. While his ducks are mostly in order, the comparisons are a bit silly. No, I actually learned from a much more interesting source: DiskKeeper. They used to make Defrag software for VAX VMS, then converted it to run on NT when it came out. Funny thing that. You'd almost think that the two systems were so similar that it would be a natural port, now wouldn't you?
(Sarcasm aside, DiskKeeper actually had to distribute a custom version of NT 3.x because Microsoft hadn't provided any method of relocating file system blocks. Microsoft eventually worked this feature into NT 4.0.)
Device Drivers (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone know if this means no restart required after a driver update?
There was a rewrite of OS/2 in... (Score:2, Interesting)
The rewrite was based on the Mach kernel and it was done for the PPC. It was really nice. It's a shame it was killed - as far I as know. IBM is a huge company and I haven't worked there in 10 years, so take what I've said with a grain of salt or two.
apples and oranges (Score:5, Interesting)
EROS uses C and relies on memory management hardware for isolation. EROS also can't analyze or verify code it loads.
Singularity uses C# and does not use memory management hardware for protection; it guarantees isolation via runtime checks, and it can perform extensive code analysis on load.
I don't know whether Singularity is going to make it, but I have used and developed on systems like it (the idea isn't new), and it is a lot nicer than either UNIX kernels or EROS-like kernels.
Re:Define "innovation" in that context. (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely, but to generalize their contribution to modern computing as nothing more than theft and good marketing is pure garbage.
Ok, that's your opinion. I however beleive that they have only copied and stolen products without any real innovation.
Microsoft started by selling BASIC intepreters for the old Altair computers. However, their compilers were mainly based on public domain alternatives at the time. (Copy and/or stolen, not innovation)
As we progress to the era of DOS, When M$ was approach by IBM, they said they had a CP/M clone (but didn't) and bought the rights to QDOS which they resold as their own. (Clone of CP/M which they bought)
Further history of Microsoft reveals much more of the same.
Microsoft is a monopoly and does not innovate. I have shown multiple examples of this. Microsoft will buy or copy things that are truly innovative and then try to rewrite history as if they were their own all of history.
You have not given even one example of Microsoft innovation. When you do I may consider your post valid.
Re:IMPORTANT (Score:5, Interesting)
The table shows the CPU cost of six different types of operations: "Read Cycle Counter", "ABI Call", "Thread yield", "2 thread wait-set ping pong", "2 message ping pong" and "Create and start process". For the first one, Windows seems to kick the butt of all others handily with Singularity being the worst of the bunch. For "ABI Call", each OS used different system calls that "operate on a readily available data structure in the respective kernels." The system calls seem to be completely different so I don't know if this test is valid, but the results show Singularity an order of magnitude more efficient than the others, with Linux beating Windows by a considerable margin and Windows beating FreeBSD by an equally considerable margin.
For the "thread yield" tests, FreeBSD & Linux are equal, Windows beats them by a reasonable percentage and Singularity is more than twice as fast as the Unixes. For the "2 wait-set ping pong", which measures "the cost of switching between two threads in the same process through a synchronization object", the chart shows that Singularity is somewhat more efficient than Windows and Windows is more than twice as fast as the Unixes. For the "2 message ping pong", which shows the cost of sending a 1-byte message back and forth between two processes, Singularity is 4 times more efficient than Linux, which is somewhat better than Windows, which kicks FreeBSDs butt decisively.
Lastly, for "Create and start process", Singularity is twice as fast as Linux, which is about 50% faster than FreeBSD. Windows comes out 7 times slower than Linux on this test. I don't know how much that matters in the real world since creating and starting a process is not something that is done hundreds of times a second.
All that said, it should probably be pointed out that there are many ways to measure an OS. The M$ guys may have simply picked the ones that support their "see we don't suck" position. And given that Singularity is not a complete OS, I would expect that more overhead will be added later that will bring down these numbers. I guess we'll see.