re: Microkernels Revisited?

jwelch@bynkii.com — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 15:26:40 GMT

"Operating systems will be sets of services. OS’s will be chosen based on some favorite service, without giving though to “platform lock in”."

Um, Not to point out the obvious, but you do realize who you work for, and that the current Microsoft leadership would rather burn the company to the ground and sow salt on the ashes than allow this to happen. It's a nice, logical idea, and how things SHOULD be done, but completely antithetical to the Microsoft way, which is "WINDOWS! ONLY WINDOWS!"

"Operating systems components will be componentized. So that a Linux daemon will (gasp!) be able to use a Windows security component, via the use of standardized protocols. Without it knowing that it is."

Other OS developers have wanted to integrate like this with Windows for years now. Yet Microsoft fights it tooth and nail. Again, it's a great idea, and how things should work. But Microsoft will never let it happen, not with the current leadership.

Well, Ray Ozzie might, but then, he spent enough time working at odds with Microsoft to remember the pain involved.

re: Microkernels Revisited?

barmijo — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 06:40:02 GMT

AppLogic as a microkernel? The thought hadn't occurred to me. Internally, we refer to AppLogic as a meta-OS, meaning an OS that contains other operating systems.

However, I think you've missed an important point about our system when you write that the new OS "just manages the allocation of today’s OS’s." That's only half the battle of moving an application onto a grid.

The hard part is connecting the resulting virtual environments into structures. This requires collecting and representing new types of meta data about applications that aren't held anywhere else today. Without this capability, the system you describe would still require you to manage the individual OS images, configuring software with resource names, passwords, IP addresses, etc. Move the application and you need to reconfigure it all over again. In AppLogic, applications (no matter how complex) are self contained entities that are managed as objects. As a result, moving an app around the world takes just a single command - and no reconfiguration of software.