Harvey – An effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64-bit operating system

https://harvey-os.org/

by floren • 9 years ago

280 98 9 years ago

harvey-os.org

dsp1234• 9 years ago

Note that Plan 9 is already licensed under GPLv2 (with caveats I guess)[0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7232042

[1] http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/files/Plan9License

floren6• 9 years ago

Ah, yeah, Harvey is based on that release, it's just had significant changes made to the build system and the code itself. They're running continuous integration and code quality checkers. The code now builds with GCC and Clang and it builds pretty damn fast. It's a cool project and the people running it are really friendly.

baq• 9 years ago

thanks for that, was looking for a good reason why it's still C.

floren6• 9 years ago

Anyone who's wanted to play with Plan 9 should consider giving Harvey a look. Getting started is a pretty easy process: you download the repo on your Linux box (I believe it works on MacOS too), run a script to get the environment set up, run a build command. Once everything's built (about 2 minutes on a decent machine), run another script which boots Harvey in a QEMU VM. The VM will get its root filesystem from the Linux box, so you can easily experiment, make changes, test.

Harvey comes with pretty much everything you'd find on Plan 9. It also supports Go, and there's a (work in progress, but functional) POSIX layer which you can use to cross-compile POSIX programs.

drb91• 9 years ago

It does require a case-sensitive file system, so it takes some additional effort to cross compile from the mac.

Not that that's unusual :)

a1k0n• 9 years ago

The landing page doesn't really explain what is interesting about Harvey. What does it mean that it's distributed, exactly?

kruhft2• 9 years ago

Plan9 was the 'next version' of Unix made by the people that originally made Unix. It was a small (tiny!) network packet routing kernel (routing 9p, a layer above IP) that is meant to be fully distributed and networked.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-Plan-9-OS-different-from-Unix

floren6• 9 years ago

I wish the mods hadn't changed the title; I chose the original title to focus more on what's cool about it.

Anyway, Harvey is distributed in the same way that Plan 9 is/was distributed: the services are meant to be run across a network. On a properly set up network, you'll have an authentication server which does only authentication, because that's the keys to the kingdom. Similarly, you'll have a file server which ONLY serves files, and speaks to the auth server to manage access. Then you'll have a CPU server which lets remote users connect and do stuff; it mounts its root filesystem from the file server and authenticates users with the auth server. You can also have terminal machines, which typically netboot, get their root from the file server, authenticate with the auth server, and basically act as a personal workstation for whoever sits down; when you're done working, just save your work and reboot the terminal.

Of course it doesn't have to be run like that and many people don't, because they don't want to run 4+ systems. You can combine auth, FS, and CPU services onto one machine and just connect from a Windows, Linux, or Mac machine using 'drawterm' (think of it as an ssh equivalent).

euyyn3• 9 years ago

Honest question, not trying to be dismissive: This architecture sounds old to me, as in things were built like that in the 80s or earlier but evolved past. Is that so? If so, what makes those decisions newly relevant?

PuffinBlue• 9 years ago

Huh, that sounds interesting. Does it scale?

I mean, it sounds a bit like 'software defined computing' if you'll excuse the terrible metaphor, a bit like SDN which abstracted the physical networking layer.

Does Harvey abstract the hardware layer? So it could theoretically scale to a huge amount of machines that look like one giant powerful one?

Wouldn't the speed of operation be limited to the speed of the network though?

Anyway, sorry if the questions sound silly, I don't know much about this stuff.

jcoffland2• 9 years ago

you'll have an authentication server which does only authentication
you'll have a file server which ONLY serves files

These sound like disadvantages. Decentralization would be better. I'd like to share the storage of all my servers and not have one auth server as a single point of failure. I imagine you can setup up a redundant auth server at the cost of more hardware but why not decentralize? This seems a lot like the old way of doing things.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

read that in Hurd's voice

sehugg• 9 years ago

There's a little more context here: https://notamonadtutorial.com/harvey-an-operating-system-wit...

neopanz• 9 years ago

Agreed, if I have to do a research on Google and Quora, then the landing page failed.

I need to be told immediately why Harvey is killer and there are things you can do with it that you can't with Linux, at least not easily.

The only standout feature according to the summary is "simplified sys call". Boy, that's worth dropping Linux immediately! Not.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to show Harvey some support, but I need a compelling reason to get over the massive switching cost.

iforgotpassword• 9 years ago

Biggest mistake IMO was not clarifying what a distributed OS is supposed to be. Especially nowadays with all the cloud hype I could think of at least three different meanings right off the bat, then clicked all the links on the landing page and erratically browsed the wiki and didn't find anything, not even an external (wikipedia) link which got me quite annoyed at that point.

kruhft2• 9 years ago

Quickstart: https://github.com/Harvey-OS/harvey/wiki/Getting-Started

meddlepal• 9 years ago

I appreciate the minimal nothing fancy website design.

malkia• 9 years ago

I have more hope in projects like fuchsia, where separation of concerns is taken seriously - there are providers for "things" and on the fly configuration can glue several independent components to serve as one - for example instead of "Google Maps", "Bing Maps", or "Apple Maps" - you would have several map data providers (maybe some with higher data quality for specific regions), several map data viewers, several events, places, traffic, etc. providers - and you end up with one combined view of all them, e.g. not application but an user "story", as briefly explained here:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/modular/+/master/docs/modul...

jcoffland2• 9 years ago

Seems susceptible to dependency hell.

geezerjay2• 9 years ago

Do you see any dependency hell in requesting that the OS launches a web browser or email client?

barrkel2• 9 years ago

What you describe sounds like a recipe for the lowest common denominator in features combined with a geometric increase in bugs.

If it's just linking, loose coupling, it might work OK (for something like document creation or messaging) but it won't be integrated at a higher semantic level.

geezerjay2• 9 years ago

lowest common denominator on feautures

That's pretty much standard behavior in the mobile world. Services and activities are made available and the app petitions the OS to access those "lowest common denominator features".

Although you've decided to reffer to it in disdain, it's also a very basic principle in software design.

geometric increase in bugs

Only if you believe that developing and maintaining specialized programs somehow increases the bug count "geometrically".

bastawhiz• 9 years ago

you would have several map data providers (maybe some with higher data quality for specific regions), several map data viewers, several events, places, traffic, etc. providers - and you end up with one combined view of all them

I think the doc you linked to doesn't support your idea; it sounds much more like the replacement for activities and intents in Android than what you described. The service providers have no incentive to supply data independent of a full experience (why would Bing let you show maps in your app without agreeing to a ToS? what if the map provider has different streets than the traffic provider?), the app developers have no incentive to do this (if one phone might display Bing maps and another Google in my app, how does that make my life easier?), and the user probably doesn't want this (why am I seeing grainy black and white satellite imagery in one area and high fidelity color imagery in another?).

Think of the headache gluing all that data together. Every map viewer would need to support the data format for every map provider. Every traffic service would need to expose a protocol for querying traffic data on a stretch of road, and you pray that they mostly work the same and know which streets are which. You hope that every point-of-interest provider exposes the same set of fields and level of detail you need to make them useful. And that doesn't begin to touch on the intersection of rendering things well and the data needed to make that work (which streets to show at each zoom level, arrangement of points of interest, knowing which streets are important enough to show traffic for, special cases like when freeways are closed...).

nine_k2• 9 years ago

There's a difference between the systems where this is difficult, and systems where this is outright impossible.

On gluing things together: look at your nearest npm-based software project. It may not be very pretty, but it works in a reasonable way.

jandrese• 9 years ago

Honestly this sounds like a maintenance nightmare. You would have to track API changes not from one provider but three or more, and figure out what to do when there are differences in the data, and how to integrate features that are similar but not identical. Maintaining just a couple of those systems would be a full time job.

endorphone• 9 years ago

This sounds like the dreamy infinitely versatile paper design for countless failed projects.

"And our database will be one table with Int64 possible properties and Variant data for any type, and..."

rootw0rm2• 9 years ago

This is the most polite way to express exactly my thoughts.

yoz-y2• 9 years ago

Doesn’t Windows phone also work like this?

mcny• 9 years ago

*didn't

It is time to give up on Windows Phone.

tomc19852• 9 years ago

Will publishers ever stand for that? Or will they bitch and moan about feeling "unable to provide a satisfactory customer (read: branding) experience" while they go and reinvent the wheel (read: write their own proprietary version)?

baudehlo• 9 years ago

This basically sounds like OLE. Ah memories!

tfolbrecht• 9 years ago

What is OLE?

BillinghamJ• 9 years ago

Are you a Java developer by any chance?

Honestly that sounds disastrous. Idealistically, sure it’s a nice idea. Practically, it’d be unusable.

pjmlp4• 9 years ago

If I understood him/her correctly, it looks pretty much like COM, or the component models in iOS and Android.

They seem to be doing pretty well.

desireco42• 9 years ago

We really could use something new, so I am ready to give anything new a shot. Something completely free and open to new ways of thinking.

Animats2• 9 years ago

It's in C, offers POSIX, and apparently a big-kernel OS. Looks like another Unix-type OS. Why?

An OS in Rust would be a step forward. An OS like QNX would be a step forward. An OS like QNX in Rust would be just what the IoT world needs. But another UNIX/Linux clone? Why?

jstewartmobile6• 9 years ago

It seems like they're taking the same approach as QNX, except across boxes instead of within the same box.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Did you find an architecture description anywhere in there? I've been looking for one.

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

This is a plan9 descendant.

pjmlp4• 9 years ago

The actual end of line for Plan 9, was Inferno using Limbo as the userspace language, but many seem to keep forgetting about it.

Harvey would be cool if they would continue Inferno, but with Go instead of Limbo.

As it is, it isn't that much interesting from OS architecture point of view.

fellowmartian• 9 years ago

https://www.redox-os.org/

jstewartmobile6• 9 years ago

Why so many haters? Just the fact that they've got Ron Minnich[0-1] on the team--one of the guys fighting the good fight against all of the voodoo BS in your Intel/AMD firmware--makes it worth a look IMHO.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/738649/

ElijahLynn2• 9 years ago

"Harvey is a distributed operating system. It is direct descendant of Plan 9 from Bell Labs which was originally developed by the same group at Bell Labs that invented Unix and C."

https://github.com/Harvey-OS/harvey

eximius• 9 years ago

I wonder how this compares with Redox OS. This is Plan 9-like, which Redox could be with its 'everything is a URI' concept, but I haven't used either to see.

qwerty456127• 9 years ago

It can be built with gcc and clang

Again... I understand many will argue but I also believe many will agree: we are to start phasing out C and write modern OSes in safe languages like Rust, Haskell, Go, Crystal etc. Because code written in C is almost guaranteed to be vulnerable. C has done its job when the hardware was slow and low on memory, electronic data was rarely life-important and when there were no languages and compilers that could be used as alternatives but that time has ended and now we are to consider different priorities.

soulbadguy• 9 years ago

Go and haskell are targeted at a different level of abstraction than an OS lives at.I don't know much about crystall but I has a GC.

bb882• 9 years ago

we are to start phasing out C and write modern OSes in safe languages.

Linus Torvolds probably has the best answer to why not.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1t0gfy/linus_t...

"When I read C, I know what the assembly language will look like."

cmrdporcupine• 9 years ago

Except in this day and age reading the assembly language doesn't give you the same kind of insight into how the hardware will perform as it did 15 years ago.

pjmlp4• 9 years ago

Only at optimization level 0 and assuming a dumb C compiler.

jstewartmobile6• 9 years ago

When it's time to speak directly to hardware, Rust and Haskell aren't exactly silver bullets: so much of the state ends up being in the chips instead of the program--thus outside the compiler's scope.

If we want to get away from C-level twiddling, we will also need to get away from C-level hardware.

tome2• 9 years ago

It's not outside the compiler's scope at all. See for example http://www.clash-lang.org/.

civility• 9 years ago

Armchair preaching? Who is this "we" in "we are to do anything"? Unless you're contributing to a replacement, your proclamation simply doesn't matter.

digitalzombie• 9 years ago

Nice to see all these new OS coming out.

I'm personally rooting for HURD (https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html) and Barrelfish(http://www.barrelfish.org/)

codepie• 9 years ago

Obligatory XKCD for operating systems: https://xkcd.com/1508/

rcarmo• 9 years ago

This runs surprisingly well as a Docker container. The awkwardness of trying to use rio on a laptop with a (non-existent) three-button mouse is still there, though, and I hope other Plan9-related projects are considering bringing the GUI UX up to speed, since using a trackpad with drawterm is still awkward...

xj9• 9 years ago

i take a lot of inspiration from plan 9, but a lot of the distributed computing architecture that it is built around is severely outdated and based on a lot of untrue assumptions. for example, you can't really expect to have always-on, low latency internet access. especially if you get anywhere near a mobile context. without good networking plan 9 falls on its ass. so you have to consider, how do you implement the shape of plan 9, without depending on the mythical "reliable network"?

i don't have an answer exactly, but i am looking for one[0]. we are using the linux kernel because hardware support and you don't really need any special kernel features to implement a plan 9-like (read the paper, they didn't to anything special kernel-wise). i'm in the process of copying my offline notes into our wiki, so uh stay tuned or whatever.

i'm hoping to publish a really early preview build some time next week, but we'll see how far i get while i'm on holiday. it'll be soon in any case.

[0] https://www.heropunch.io/%E5%8F%8B

k3a• 9 years ago

I appreciate the effort but I have a feeling that there is not enough developers for existing free OSes and I am not sure it is very wise to fragment the community even more.

Harvey – An effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64-bit operating system

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