Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000)

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

by uriel • 17 years ago

39 28 17 years ago

doc.cat-v.org

timf7• 17 years ago

Written August 5th, 2000

"Irrelevant: Does not influence industry"

Two years later came Xen, a systems research project that has definitely influenced industry.

uriel6• 17 years ago

If Xen is the best you can come up as a result of research impacting industry in the last ten years... IBM had been doing basically the same for decades, so I'm not sure one could consider Xen particularly revolutionary.

Edit: Also note that Xen in no way fulfills the definition of Systems Research, it is simply a new minor twist on a very old idea.

ams6110• 17 years ago

OK, to play devil's advocate, Xen is nothing new in the same way that Pike claims Linux is nothing new.

Hypervisors and virutalization have been around since the late '60s.

Locke16894• 17 years ago

Look up "paravirtualization."

timf7• 17 years ago

Sure, I agree with you, there was no "huge paradigm shift" (that is so extremely rare in CS).

But there was a virtualization efficiency advance that got an impressive number of companies to actively jump into the project (with time and money) which (along with it being free) made it explode, mature, and eventually make things like commodity computing rental via EC2 possible to implement just years later.

I agree with him that there is so much established infrastructure/standardization out there that doing something completely game changing is hard if not impossible. Which is why I think weighing things against such a behemoth industry, Xen's story is impressive.

It did what he wanted: "Make the industry want your work." But it's because it is useful, not just because it is cool. As for grant money's role in all this, it's the same issue. Like arts and humanities vs. energy/science, the lion's share of research funding is always going to go towards what will most likely advance the country's economy/technology.

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245227

EDIT: Here's Pike's update: http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532...

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

Thank you for posting this.

gruseom• 17 years ago

The following passage from that second piece is fascinating (I had never heard of the "Unix room"... it sounds like an illustration of Conway's Law, and a lot of fun too).

One odd detail that I think was vital to how the group functioned was a result of the first Unix being run on a clunky minicomputer with terminals in the machine room. People working on the system congregated in the room - to use the computer, you pretty much had to be there. (This idea didn't seem odd back then; it was a natural evolution of the old hour-at-a-time way of booking machines like the IBM 7090.) The folks liked working that way, so when the machine was moved to a different room from the terminals, even when it was possible to connect from your private office, there was still a `Unix room' with a bunch of terminals where people would congregate, code, design, and just hang out. (The coffee machine was there too.) The Unix room still exists, and it may be the greatest cultural reason for the success of Unix as a technology. More groups could profit from its lesson, but it's really hard to add a Unix-room-like space to an existing organization. You need the culture to encourage people not to hide in their offices, you need a way of using systems that makes a public machine a viable place to work - typically by storing the data somewhere other than the 'desktop' - and you need people like Ken and Dennis (and Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy and Mike Lesk and Stu Feldman and Greg Chesson and ...) hanging out in the room, but if you can make it work, it's magical.

Locke16894• 17 years ago

Agreed. My research: http://v3vee.org/. I don't even know what to say about this article - it's just so poorly thought out and researched that I can't believe it.

uriel6• 17 years ago

> I don't even know what to say about this article - it's just so poorly thought out and researched that I can't believe it.

You are clearly missing the point by a few miles...

kmavm• 17 years ago

And two years earlier had come VMware.

The explosion of interest in virtualization was started by VMware, a commercial entity, which rather makes Pike's point. Xen was started in response to the lack of an academia-friendly platform for virtualization research; "paravirtualization" was not initially a design goal, but rather an expedient choice to avoid the difficulties of correctly virtualizing the x86.

And while I'm biased, VMware's solution to this problem (dynamic binary translation from supervisor x86 to user-level x86) is massively more inventive, interesting and useful than Xen's solution (hack up the kernel). I emphasize "useful", because a lot of VMware's customers were most interested in running Windows, which was not paravirtulization-ready until 2008, a full ten years after VMware's products were available.

timf7• 17 years ago

VMware's awesome... but its roots are also in academia, the company was started by a Stanford professor and his PhD students.

It seems like a circular argument if the criteria of an academic project "successfully influencing industry" is widespread adoption but that adoption cannot be facilitated by a commercial entity.

[As a side note -- the impetus for Xen, and also somewhat for VMware, was in a vision of global appliance-based computing, not in "virtualization research." I think that is really interesting given what just happened in this area in the last 3 or 4 years.]

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku (http://haiku-os.org), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a lot of energy is spent on POSIX compatibility (Haiku is not UNIX, but there's a compatibility layer that allows trivial POSIX software to compile with very few changes, and makes porting larger pieces of software possible).

This, of course, has to be done. Otherwise there will be a whole bunch of software future Haiku users will miss out on, and a whole bunch of trivial software the developers would have to rewrite from scratch. Oh, and then it would take way too much effort to port Perl, Python, Ruby, Vim ...

These days, "portable software" pretty much means "targets POSIX".

uriel6• 17 years ago

There is a reason Plan 9 dumped PoSix, there is APE ( http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape ) but to properly maintain it would take way more effort than the rest of the OS.

And it is becoming even worse, 'all the world is a vax' has become 'all cpus are x86(-64), all the kernels are linux, all the libcs are glibc, and all the compilers are gcc', portability of most software is awful, and auto*hell only makes things much worse.

krakensden• 17 years ago

On the other hand, in that world at least you only have the broken insanity of one operating system/library stack to worry about instead of three or four.

``Not Linux'' is not the same as 'perfect', no matter what the *BSD people say.

heresyforme• 17 years ago

New OS stagnation could be showing the trend away from the OS. A return to the terminal? Cloud computing could be the first new step of many. In many ways we may no longer need the local OS.

dinkumthinkum• 17 years ago

Maybe someone should inform SOSP. By the way guys virtualization is hardly the only thing going on in systems research. As far as the Web replacing the OS... Honestly if HTTP/HTML is the sole future of innovation in computing then that is a bit sad. As for Cloud Computing, well, let's say the reports of the demise of systems research have been greatly, greatly exagerrated. Actually, looking at my dept this just seems to be a pitifully naive view.there are plenty of projects and not the time nor enough grad students to do them all.

cpr• 17 years ago

I'm wondering if it's time for a revival of the capability-based OS's of the 70's, such as Hydra/C.mmp, CMU's flagship OS of the time.

Seems like the raw performance is there, and the CPU parallelism is there. Certainly the time is ripe for a more secure basis for operating systems, and capabilities still seem like one of the best theoretical foundations around.

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000)

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