Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Scheme VM like a microkernel service

Yes, it's an idea. I'm thinking about benefits in the microkernel and multiservice OS on desktop or some kind of development environment. Well, I know all the things that going in microkernel while you calling fork() after those exec() - it takes a lot of system time.
Usually within shell you makes fork()/exec() every time when you starts anything - ls,cat ... or you can wrong with some arguments for utility and this will increase system job time. Also, it's a waste of a time to implement small utils on C, there are few POSIX things, few useful things, few OS specific things and so on. Better one - run login/shell environment within VM context - like a thread, all utils will runs like a thread (thread creation in Jari OS isn't so wasteful) and writing simple things on scheme is a simple and fast process. It doesn't mean that Jari OS reject exec/fork and other POSIX calls, it's mean that we can take a benefits on desktop I think.
Many people told me that microkernel is sucks and microkernel is bad for desktop - well, most of them doesn't know anything about OS design, but others are right in some case. But I want to make some note - there are no existing microkernel (and multiservice) OSes with a pure microkernel and multiservers design (I don't take early, prototype-like, featureless systems, like Jari OS and some line of other interest projects, HelenOS for example) - yes it's a first thing to think that microkernel sucks, second it's a performance - yes context switching, calls partially going outside of the caller time slice and so on, it's not the problem as well, for most I/O operations context switch and related thing is very little compare to disk I/O or other I/O (no, I don't mean highband special devices), also most of technical microkernel critics based on existing solution - that can has ugly design (I don't want to make a shit showing examples here).
My thesis - Well designed and implemented microkernel and multiservice OS can works at the same speed as monolithic OS works, but ugly designed monolithic OS will be ran slowly then microkernel based OS with good design. Also, you should remember that some abstractions in monolith made within user space - like example GUIs, and I don't think that some operations will be slowly on microkernel.
And ... the main idea - for microkernel world you should keep in mind microkernel oriented solutions, instead of porting old and ugly tricks from monolithic - schemevm running as microkernel service is such solution.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

RMS once said, that it's a bad idea to use "extension" languages instead of real ones. It was a nice trolling against tcl community.^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W The key thing RMS mentioned, is stat we stuck with old shitty languages like a posix shell. We should bury it and use as much abstraction provided by languages as possible.

johnbessa said...

I chatted with RMS one time and found simple tech to be over his head.

Supervisor said...

Anyways, it's just an idea.