After reading all 4 parts (up to part IV), this is pretty underwhelming.
The author makes a lot of noise about reinventing OS and mentions "heresy" a lot, but his main idea is a non-preemptable thread which runs an event loop. You know, like Erlang's BEAM; or running one boost::asio event loop per core; or Windows 3.11; or, going back to embedded examples, using nesC/TinyOS.
Additionally, there are also a lot of random ideas which have no explanation and have obvious known problems that need to be addressed: "vast majority" of processes is shared-nothing; non-stop record/replay debugging on every API call; same kernel API for devices with 32 KB and 32 GB of RAM; "API groups" which are replacing libraries; optional preemption. One can certainly make them work, but this is non-trivial, and author does not provide any answers (actually he just does not mention possible problems at all)
I feel that the author maybe had some ideas, but run out of steam? Or maybe the comments caused him to re-think the his ideas? Either way, the last post was in 2019, so I guess we will never know.
I am surprised ithare.com would publish such incomplete / partially incorrect series.
Related: The keynote presentation from OSDI (Operating Systems Design and and Implementation) online conference: “It’s Time for Operations Systems to Rediscover Hardware”:
The presenter says that, of the 103 papers about operating systems published by OSDI in 2020 and 2021, only three were not about Linux!
Covered a few months ago:
I know I shouldn't "judge a book by it's first few paragraphs", but the "40-50 years old = bad" is such an annoying fallacy in tech.
It's like throwing out proven fundamentals of how to build a bridge just because we went from horse and buggy to cars.
(I say this as a nerd that desperately wishes for a lisp os that goes down to the metal, for plan 9 to be popular, etc.)
I think you could actually justify it with something sufficiently radical, but TFA fails to do that.
To make progress in OS architecture, it’s optimal to have a clear view of the failings you want to address. The author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of basically everything.
Unix is garbage in a lot of ways. But there’s nothing to see here.
The author mixed up VAX the computer architecture and VMS the operating system.
In the future, OS will be a DB-like, and Clojure will be the best DML, The future OS kernel will be a data-oriented scheduler (with Computer hardware and software integration architecture diagram)
https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...
Reference
1. The Math-based Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model
https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
Its mathematical prototype is the simple, classic, vivid, and widely used in social production practice, elementary school mathematics "water input/output of the pool". My theory rebuilt the theoretical foundation of the IT industry, It makes the computer theory system fully & perfectly related to mathematics in a simple and unified way: from hardware integrated circuits and computer architecture, to software programming methodology, architecture, programming language and so on. It solve the most fundamental and core major problems in the IT industry: The foundation and core of the IT theory lack mathematical support.
2. Why my "warehouse/workshop model" can achieve high performance and low power consumption (take Apple M1 chip, Intel AVX-512, Qualcomm as examples)
https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...
3. Foxpro Database-oriented programming paradigm is the development direction of the future programming language
https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow...