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Operating Systems of The Future ( and Plan 9 )

Operating Systems of The Future ( and Plan 9 ). Shilad Sen – April 26 th , 2007. Today’s Topics. Design our own world-dominating OS. Discuss Plan 9, an OS that many people thought should have dominated the world. Design a Better OS. Hypothetical Question:

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Operating Systems of The Future ( and Plan 9 )

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  1. Operating Systems of The Future( and Plan 9 ) Shilad Sen – April 26th, 2007

  2. Today’s Topics • Design our own world-dominating OS. • Discuss Plan 9, an OS that many people thought should have dominated the world.

  3. Design a Better OS • Hypothetical Question: • Google wants to enter the OS market. • Provide Google with three examples of something the three major OS’s get “wrong.” What you would you do differently?

  4. Some Areas to Consider • Networking / Sockets • Threading • File I/O • Security • Scheduling • Windowing System / User Interface Examples: 1. Eliminate all non-unicode char *’s. 2. Add an “e” “creat()” system call (Ken Thomson) 3. Copy / paste: an open problem (consolidate to a centralized copy/paste server).

  5. How Should We Build Our OS?

  6. Plan 9 from Bell Labs • Designed in mid 80’s by many of the creators of UNIX (Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie) • Major Architectural Concepts: • Distributed Operating System • All resources are represented as files • Application resources are organized via customizable namespaces • Standardized communication protocol (9P)

  7. Everything’s a File! • In many early operating systems, different types of block devices had different API’s. • One major innovation in UNIX was the single file I/O API for multiple devices. • Plan 9 treats virtually all devices and services as file-based services: • telnet • ftp • nfs

  8. Example: Opening a Socket % cat /net/tcp/clone/ctl 44 % cd /net/tcp/44 % echo connect 128.2.194.80!79 > ctl % echo ping > data % cat data pong

  9. Namespaces • Any file resource can be “mounted” in a customizable directory hierarchy, or namespace: • Several directories can be mounted at the same point – replaces the need for a $PATH bind /home/shilad/bin /bin bind /i386/bin /bin • Copying a local file foo to a remote floppy: import lab.pc /a: /n/dos cp foo /n/dos/ • Piping the output of foo on host1 to bar on host2 cpu -h host1 foo | cpu -h hos2 bar

  10. Communication Protocol • File-based API supports 17 standard I/O file operations • “Device drivers” (e.g. a telnet server) need only implement the 17 operations. • A mounting service transparently transmits local file commands to remote systems using the 9P protocol.

  11. Process Model • The rfork system call duplicates a process • Individual resources can be shared, copied, or created anew: • Name space • Environment • File descriptor table • Memory segments • Both fork() and pthread_create() are special cases of rfork()

  12. Synchronization rendezvous system call: Thread 1 Thread 2 rendevous("foo",value1) rendezvous("foo",value2) both calls block until they receive the “foo” tag value2 value1

  13. Security • No superuser • An authentication server maintains a database of authentication keys for all users • Both client and server exchange encryption challenges and responses so each side is convinced of the others’ identity. • All 9P network communications are secure

  14. Plan 9’s Failure • In 1998, Lucent pulled developers off of Plan 9 to focus on related Inferno OS. • Neither Plan 9 nor Inferno were commercially successful. • Most experts agree that Plan 9 was technically superior to UNIX but… • Most experts agree that Plan 9 was not superior enough to convert users of UNIX

  15. Plan 9’s Success • Plan 9 open-sourced in 2000 • Dedicated developer and user base remain today • Google Summer of Code Project • Plan 9 influenced Linux / BSD: • /proc filesystem • clone() interface • As of 2.6.14, 9P-based file device drivers in stable Linux Kernel

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