10 Dec
2020
10 Dec
'20
5:22 a.m.
On Dec 9, 2020, at 9:06 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
If you want to see a system that was more thoroughly _designed_, you
should probably point not to Dennis and Ken, but to systems like L4 and
Plan-9, and people like Jochen Liedtk and Rob Pike.
And notice how they aren't all that popular or well known? "Design" is
like a religion - too much of it makes you inflexibly and unpopular.
I recently read an article that says in biology the “neutral
theory” (random chance has a profound effect on genetics and
evolution) is much more accepted now than Darwin & Wallace’s
“Principle of Natural Selection” (survival of the fittest).
This seems to apply here as well. Seems popularity has more
to do with being in the right place at the right time. Both
Plan9 & L4 are certainly more flexible.
IMHO the “religion” we are suffering from is "speed" or
rather too much attention to premature optimization in the
small. Each layer may be efficient but too many layers get
used so at the system level things are much worse: slower and
so complex that no one person understands the system. While
h/w performance and capacity has increased by orders of
magnitude, s/w has frittered away most of it. This religion
(including use of unsafe languages like C) has been largely
responsible for most of the vulnerabilities. We end up using
containers and virtual machines (VMs) to try counter these
vulnerabilities. VMs are a sledgehammer that wouldn’t be
required for isolation if all the user s/w ran on a
secure-by-design kernel (or hardware). Note that even the h/w
features vulnerable to security attacks were put in to improve
performance.