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Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system?Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system?Posted Nov 30, 2012 3:43 UTC (Fri) by skissane (subscriber, #38675)Parent article: Haiku edges toward general release
Haiku definitely contains some interesting ideas. But rather than building a whole new operating system (even an open source reimplementation of a long discontinued proprietary one), might it make more sense to take the innovative features of BeOS, and add them to an existing OS (e.g. Linux)? For example, that file system attribute feature sure is interesting, but does it need a whole new OS? Couldn't you just create a new filesystem, say for Linux, to provide the same function? (maybe use the existing xattrs concept in Linux, but maybe add some IOCTLs to enable fast querying for xattr values?)
If you are just doing it for fun, then hope you have fun! But if your hope is that someone else finds what you produce useful, it might make more sense to extend an existing system than build a whole new one - uptake is more likely that way.
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Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Nov 30, 2012 8:54 UTC (Fri) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> might it make more sense to take the innovative features of BeOS, and add them to an existing OS
Note that one of the most innovative feature of BeOS was responsiveness(*), it's quite hard to add responsiveness to an existing OS..
*: it's difficult to know why it was much more responsive than the other OS (being closed source), but I think that it was because of heavy use of multi-threading: each GUI program had a dedicated thread to manage the window and the display server was also multi-threaded.
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Nov 30, 2012 16:26 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
The early Hobbit & PPC releases were responsive due to a complete lack of memory protection... The GPU was mapped into each application's memory space and shared appkit/drawing libs would bang it directly. No context switching. As this was fixed, that "omigod YES" feeling went away a little.
Of course, CPUs are now 50 times faster. It seems like every operating system should feel WAY faster than BeOS did, but only iOS (and maybe Jellybean) seem to be in the same camp.
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Nov 30, 2012 16:40 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Sorry, bad wording. There was not a *complete* lack of memory protection since it obviously used the MMU... But when safety vs. latency questions came up, the decision pretty much always went toward lowering latency.
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Nov 30, 2012 16:47 UTC (Fri) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Well I didn't use an Hobbit and AFAIK on PCs BeOS had memory protection and it was still much more responsive than anything else at the time.
It would be interesting to know if BeOS still feel more responsive than current OSs on modern hardware (especially one with a SSD)..
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Nov 30, 2012 17:21 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Check out what I said about mapping the GPU... Any app could use the GPU to DMA anywhere on the machine. Saving those context switches counts for a LOT, but means that you don't really need to worry about security since your machine is wide open anyway.
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Dec 3, 2012 17:31 UTC (Mon) by samroberts (subscriber, #46749) [Link]
Hard to add sufficiently new paradigms to Linux. ReiserFS tried, for example, didn't fly.
Would it make more sense to add features to an existing system? Posted Dec 3, 2012 17:54 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
There has been sufficient counter-examples. I think the reiserfs 4 issue was more of a personality mismatch (ie) clash of egos combined with the technical approach rather than the newness of the features.
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