[colug-432] Unix Is The Last Operating System

[Stephen Potter]

So, I've been pondering something recently.  Not so much the exact quote 
below, but the concept of the end of the Operating System.

With so much of the world now virtualized or (dare I say) cloud-based, 
when comes the point that we no longer need generic OSes?  When does the 
hypervisor become the OS, and the application start to include 
everything it needs to run on the hypervisor directly?  With the 
hypervisor handling the abstraction of most of the hardware, including 
to a large extent process scheduling and memory management even, the 
guest OS becomes much simpler.  There is no longer a need for the guest 
to support features such as page sharing or garbage collection.  It 
doesn't need a robust networking stack with all of the lower level 
protocol support.

A lot of the complexity of the modern OS comes from general use/user 
mode features.  If you start to look at single use guests (virtual 
appliances, if you will) which often have their own built-in application 
specific "user modes", user management, and API management layers,  you 
start to remove the need for large parts of the basic OS.  If you remove 
the need to individual users, you remove the need for shells, for the 
variety of scripting tools, display managers, remote access programs, 
generic troubleshooting tools, OS level firewalls.  You remove 
complexity, decrease attack profiles, increase security, increase 
performance.

As you move further along, you no longer have need for a variety of 
filesystem types - perhaps to the point of not even needing a 
traditional filesystem at all.

Oracle started toward this trend with features like ASM to take care of 
storage management a long time ago.
What is the next logical step, and when does it happen?

-spp


On 6/16/2015 8:38 PM, jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:
> Someone amongst us said something like: "Unix is the last operating 
> system. Later operating systems just reinvent it, often badly."