Re: Drivers -- below the OS? [LWN.net]

Re: Drivers -- below the OS?

Posted Aug 10, 2007 21:29 UTC (Fri) by heckler (guest, #46684)
In reply to: Re: Drivers -- below the OS? by landley
Parent article: Re: Drivers -- below the OS?

Sadly, I've not read "The Innovator's Dilemma", perhaps I should (nice review by the way)... My overuse of the word value is probably an alliteration thing with virtualization...

The real issue here is, why would an astute technical person purchase such a limited machine from Best Buy? Likewise, why would an astute technical person confuse host based, bare metal based and pv based virtualization? Not to mention a lack of understanding for the architectural differences between where Xen based and the upcoming Viridian hypervisor places and handles drivers, - vs- how something like VMware's ESX handles drivers. In the OS based (Xen/Viridian), all your VMs on a box can get locked via misbehaving driver interaction as you state. Thankfully, with something like ESX that wont happen. As for memory and chopping it in half or writing to the wrong location, have you considered shadow tables, memory overscription and balloon drivers found in some of VMwares products. I'll not go into the elegant stuff they do in ring0, the world switch, and the efforts being done with AMD/Intel in ring-1. Doing so could hamper the growth of some pointy hair on my balding head :-)

> Adding layers neither reduces complexity nor adds stability. It never has.

Never is such a long time when you look backwards. Looking forward, perhaps the days of a bloated Os are coming to a close. Without endorsing it, perhaps some of the "layers" BEA's adding to the stack, owing to virtualization, might give you pause to rethink your statement. (http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/co...) In such a stack, I now have a ring-1 perhaps, a virtualization layer, an OS shim within their Liquid VM, a JVM and finally my app. Lots of layers, lots of stability. And its a lot easier to develop apps, debug and admin the system in that environment then when I wrote assembly code, on a microkernel on top of an AN/UYK-20

Lastly, get a MAC and stop dinkering around with dell, HP, etc. Then go get VMware's Fusion for the other 60 or so OSs that product will allow you to run. Perhaps they'll throw in a pre-IPO stock share....

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