Re: [TUHS] CMU Mach sources?

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 05:22:05PM -0700, Chris Hanson wrote: I'm not missing anything. Go read this: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~norm/508/2009W1/mach_usenix86.pdf It talks about how simple Mach is, how it is going to be what Unix wanted to be but Unix got too complicated. Etc. It sounds fantastic, too good to be true and that's exactly what the code is. You can go on all you want about all the cool research it enabled, which I've not disputed other than to say I didn't see much work out. But OK, cool research vehicle, got it. What it is not is the simple awesome system that the papers described. I was super stoked when I read that initial Mach paper, it seemed like they wanted to clean up Unix and they had a plan. I was very hopeful that they were doing that, I agreed with their statements in section 2. Anyone who has read the code would have a hard time reconciling their code with the picture they painted in their papers. And indeed, the Mach supporters have said nothing about the code, other than to say it is a research system and you can't expect clean code. If it had been advertised as that you wouldn't hear a peep out of me. But it was advertised as a clean up of poor choices in Unix, it was advertised as simple and clean. It is anything but that. I've got no problem with prototypes so long as it is clear that's what it is. My disappointment with Mach is I thought they were cleaning things up, that's what they said, that's not what they delivered. My beef is with their false advertising. If they had advertised that this was a research system for exploring OS research, not a production ready system, I'd have been fine. That's not how I read the Mach papers. They made promises that they didn't deliver. With that, I'm done on this topic. I'm not going to convince some people of what I think, and they are not going to convince me of what I think.