[colug-432] Unix Is The Last Operating System

[Rob Funk]

Stephen Potter wrote:
> 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.

If you consider the Linux kernel to be the hypervisor, that's starting
to sound like Docker and similar Container systems. You could set
things up so that the host only has enough to run the containers, and
all applications run in containers - which in turn each contain nothing
that's not necessary for running that application.

> 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.

I think many of the things you want to get rid of will long remain
useful security and system management tools. You risk throwing things
out only to see them gradually added back in (reinvented poorly).

> 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.

"Not a traditional filesystem" means yet another filesystem, optimized
for the specific purpose at hand. You'll have different filesystems
for different purposes.


There's been speculation and observance over the last few years that
the traditional PC is disappearing in favor of tablets and the like.
But there will always be people with specialized needs who aren't
served such devices -- for example, developers writing code for those
tablets and for the servers they rely on.