[colug-432] Unix Is The Last Operating System

[Rick Troth]

The following caught my attention too.

On 06/17/2015 10:24 AM, 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?   ... 

See below for bi-level op sys.

>    ... 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.

Keep in mind that hypervisors commonly support "para" or "full" (lately
"both" more and more).
Para-virtualization is especially helpful for stand-alone apps.

Gotta talk about the bigger virtualization story.
The mainframe hypervisor is truly incredible.
I frequently rattle on about it. There are typically two responses:
For those who know "z" (and maybe actually *like* it) it's preaching to
the choir.
For those who don't know it (maybe don't like it, or at least don't
like/trust IBM) it's dear-in-the-headlights.
Bummer.

KVM is just barely beginning to pick-up some of the features of z/VM,
things like sharing a chunk of memory across guests.

There's so much more to be done with hypervisors, but the market is
passing them.
Hypervisors are more secure than containers, but convenience trumps
security.
Well ... there's also performance.

Containers outperform hypervisors.
Para-virt outperforms full-virt. (with less risks than containers)
I AM NOT slamming containers.

But ... key point from Stephen's comment:
Prior to popular contemporary virtualization, IBM's "VM" was a *bi-level
operating system* product. The hypervisor served the kernel role and two
or three reduced guest op sys served the "user space" role. The
hypervisor could always go full-virt, but these specialized guest
systems leaned on para-virt so they could focus on "user space"
requirements. Very nice.



On 06/17/2015 12:27 PM, Scott Merrill wrote:
> Have you seen CoreOS or Project Atomic?
>
> https://coreos.com/
> http://www.projectatomic.io/
>
> Both extend the notion of “Just Enough OS” (which you may be familiar with from Ubuntu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_JeOS).

There's so much more to be done with hypervisors. (Is there an echo in
here?)
Reduced systems (JEOS) is understated in that context. We can get he
bi-level op sys effect from these critters, and without IBM vendor
lock-in and without limiting hardware. (KVM runs on X86, mainframe,
POWER, and now ARM)

TRULY AWESOME STUFF


On 06/17/2015 11:37 AM, Judd Montgomery wrote:
> On 06/16/2015 09:46 PM, Rick Troth wrote:
>> > As for me, I've been griping lately about two or three trends,
>> > especially in Linux. Would like to think that my whining is more due
>> > to love of simplicity than from loathing "who moved my cheese?".
>> >
> Me too!  I'm thinking about a project to replace systemd with emacs. 
>
> Judd

In a JEOS context and/or a para-virt dependent "guest", replacing
SystemD with *anything* is justified.

Few admins realize that they can replace 'init' on any Linux system
(really any POSIX system) with their own invention. They *can* and
sometimes they *should*. (For varying values of "sometimes", you
understand.)

Bi-level op sys and JEOS are places where "small is beautiful".

-- R; <><



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20150623/d28c21db/attachment.html