10 Apr
2022
10 Apr
'22
11:31 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 10, 2022 at 01:14:22PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Unfortunately, one of the two (to me) best things
about Unix, is something it
has since lost - which is its incredible bang/buck ratio - to be more
precise, the functionality/complexity ratio of the early versions of the
system.
Amen to that though I think our memory is clouded by V6 that was
uniprocessor, no networking. With all due respect to Unix, that's
not a hard problem. Systems today are more complex with SMP, NUMA,
networking, etc.
Which was good in that it helped keep the system
simple and clear - but it
limited the flexibilty and richness of the interface. (Imagine building a
large application which had a hard boundary across the middle of it, with
extremely limited interactions across the boundary. Just so with the
interface in Unix between 'user' code, and the kernel.)
That has changed in the last decade or two. Pugs did the work to expose
the IOMMU to user process and that has definitely blurred the line.
Thanks for your thoughtful email, I'm still absorbing it.