Core work still going on 33 years later [LWN.net]

Core work still going on 33 years later

Posted Oct 21, 2024 7:46 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Core work still going on 33 years later by Paf
Parent article: The long road to lazy preemption

A few things happened.

Linux grabbed the "free-software OS for commodity PCs" ecosystem niche. Perhaps it could have been MINIX with a more community-oriented owner and a better license, but it was Linux. Reasonably well-run open-source projects in important niches accrue powerful network effects.

Over the same time period, what people expect from the OS --- userspace APIs and hardware support --- grew massively, making it much harder to build a viable competitor.

And yes, for a long time the Linux kernel design was good enough ... good enough that the cost of replacing it (including the cost of migrating higher-level software to a new design) has never been justified.

But I think it would be wrong to conclude that the Linux kernel, or the general Unix-style kernel interface, is in any sense optimal. Linux has a lot of serious problems that are becoming more serious over time. The monolithic design has led us to a point where the kernel is too big to trust and developers are overwhelmed with CVEs. Relying on namespaces and seccomp for isolation makes sandboxing brittle and very complicated; I wish the system was much more capability-oriented. ptrace and signals are notoriously problematic.

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Core work still going on 33 years later

Posted Oct 22, 2024 0:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

On the third hand, Linux _is_ evolving. We now have resource partitioning via cgroups, we're evolving a new process management API that lacks braindeadness of the classic POSIX process management API. And we have io_uring for the async stuff.

I can see a world 15 years from now, where all the classic synchronous Linux system calls are reimplemented as user-space compat shims on top of a minimalistic native io_uring kernel.

Linux kernel and interface

Posted Oct 22, 2024 2:40 UTC (Tue) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

All good points re the network effects etc, though I'm not sure anyone was saying the Linux kernel or its interface is optimal. I think we're all imprisoned by the tyranny of existing software and the effort required to port it.