[TUHS] Re: The era of general purpose computing (Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 5:30 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think that was Bakul's point: almost nobody does. Most folks could be plopped down in front of a Chromebook or something and wouldn't be seriously impeded with what they do. Before my mom died, I was seriously considering setting something like that up for her. In many ways that's also true of _most_ computers these days: that desktop machine that lets you install whatever OS you want probably has a little constellation of microcontrollers embedded in it that come to life and do all sorts of stuff before the real cores ever come out of reset (power sequencing, turning on DIMMs and the IO buses, etc). What on earth are they running? Not to mention the megabytes of firmware that run before the OS ever starts to do all sorts of stuff: BAR assignment, DRAM training, all sorts of ACPI AML flows, running firmware blobs from device ROMs, etc. By the time the kernel begins execution, a lot of stuff we have no insight into whatsoever has already run, and we're mostly powerless over that. A lot of that stays resident and keeps running, even after the host OS takes over. SMM, UEFI bits, all kinds of weird goo. Who's bit-banging I2C to talk to the temperature and current meters on your DIMMs? The whole thing is built to give the OS the illusion that it's in control, but really, it isn't. Mothy Roscoe talked about this at length at OSDI'21: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote That said, I don't think that general-purpose computers as we know them will disappear. There will always be a need for, say, specialist workstations for development or engineering or media editing or whatever. On the other hand, when I was at Google I felt that the powers that be were trying pretty hard to get most developers using a cloud-based IDE-ish thing that was internal (and was remarkably good for what it was). So maybe at some point "workstations" really will be glorified 3270s talking to remote cloud services. At least until the next cycle of moving away from centralized computing and pushing compute out to autonomous edge devices kicks in. - Dan C.