HURDNG : Which type of OS design could we have to think nowadays ?

[Guillaume FORTAINE]

Hello Mr Walfield,

I point out one thing with the title of my subject : how could we choose 
the design of an OS nowadays ?

To do short, I believe the hardware decide the future and not the contrary.

I believe that HurdNG had to focus one 2 things ( lol :-), easy to tell, 
hard to design ) : security and performance. Security because all 
devices are becoming more and more connected and performance because of 
the Moore's law.


*First option :

Should we support 386 and let the OS die with this obselete hardware or 
think to the future and enjoy the power of 64 bits and multicore that 
are becoming standards ?

The ideas have to go more far that  the present, if the H?RDNG ( forget 
now UNIX:-) ) want to be a good option/successor to Linux.

A Single Adress Space OS ( 64 bits = 256 Tb, we have time before 
exploiting all this power => it would be moore easy to get rid of ACL 
because of easier implementation of persistence) and a language/main 
library thought for massive multithread (CSP or Concurrent/Parallel 
Haskell => get rid of C/ maybe GNU/UNIX/POSIX too :-) ) .

http://www.torsion.org/

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/papers/kotz:addrtrace.pdf

http://www.wotug.org/

http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/e-lang/1999-November/003069.html

http://tunes.org/wiki/Orthogonal_Persistence


*Second option  :

Explore new ideas, maybe too innovative (Have to carefully choose/adapt 
the language).

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/l4-hurd/2006-04/msg00053.html

I would add a fourth option : Get rid of a kernel :

"Isaac is an operating system purely made by dynamicaly interconnected 
prototype object. Each macro-object run on top of the processor.

 IsaacOS is not an interface with a standard kernel.  IsaacOS is fully 
made with only object. No file, no process, no kernel, just and only 
object."

http://isaacos.loria.fr/index.html

http://www.tunes.org


                        Best Regards,

                                   Guillaume FORTAINE