koyhoge
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2012–2022
19:54 · 63K views · Mar 13, 2011
The official demo video from Be, Inc. showing BeOS running multiple videos, media applications and a responsive desktop on 1990s hardware.
HN people cite it as evidence of how fast and responsive a well-designed microkernel desktop could be on modest hardware.
10 comments from Hacker News
"Tanenbaum mentions commentators on slashdot who never tried a microkernel. That's me and I never tried to write an OS either. " "Suppose I'm just interested in desktop applications. Linux is already treated as a lost cause. That's what gets me because at the moment, the microkernels don't seem like an alternative in my case. If I'm not yet convinced by the opponents, I'm looking for facts, not anecdotes or authority. " Ahh, OK. Well, I'm guessing you probably used Windows/DOS desktops back in the 1990's, right? They were OK for apps but architecturally terrible. That meant they crashed a lot, slogged down under heavy load, and so on. UNIX and Linux didn't do much better outside of SGI's machines. Hell, were barely usable. You'll appreciate what this microkernel-based, concurrency-oriented desktop is doing if you remember those days: this video Note: I couldn't even drag videos without them skipping back then. They do that in the demo while other stuff is playing. Too bad Microsoft had a monopoly and Jobs turned them down for Darwin in Next (later became Mac OS X). An early great one that's in all kinds of stuff is QNX microkernel. It did a POSIX-compatible implementation w/ microkernel, fast message-passing, and hard real-time. Later showed off its capabilities with a desktop on a floppy with GUI, web browser, etc. Users, including Animats (Nagle) here, said you could be doing day-to-day stuff with big compiles in background with no hit to responsiveness due to its great schedu
dr_dank's comment on Slashdot ( [LINK] ) pretty much sums up its awesomeness: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. If you've never played with BeOS on an old Pentium II, it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware. Here's a rough idea: this video
Not organized to be able to just throw out a reference and many disappeared over time as old web faded. It's more something you see relative to other OS's than an absolute. I really need to try to integrate all the examples sometime. Here's a few, esp from past, that give you an idea. Historical look at quite a few [LINK] Note: A number were concurrency safe, had a nucleus that preserved consistency, or were organized in layers that could be tested independently. UNIX's was actually a watered down MULTIC's & he's harsh on it there. I suggest you google it too. Burrough's B5000 Architecture (1961-) [LINK] Note: Written in ALGOL variant, protected stack, bounds checks, type-checked procedure calls dynamically, isolation of processes, froze rogue ones w/ restart allowed if feasible, and sharing components. Forward thinking. IBM System/38 (became AS/400) [LINK] Note: Capability architecture at HW level. Used intermediate code for future-proofing. OS mostly in high-level language. Integrated database functionality for OS & apps. Many companies I worked for had them and nobody can remember them getting repaired. :) Oberon System [LINK] [LINK] Note: Brilliance started in Lilith where two people in two years built HW, OS, and tooling with performance, safety, and consistency. Designed ideal assembly, safe system language (Modula-2), compiler, OS, and tied it all together. Kept it up as it evolved into Oberon, Active Oberon, etc. Now have a RISC processor ideal for it. Hansen did simi
If we're talking tech, then your post couldn't be more wrong given my BeOS and QNX examples. Performance was equal to or better than monoliths of the time. BeOS especially destroyed competition in concurrency performance due to its architecture. QNX runs at hardware speed basically with real-time properties and POSIX support. BeOS disappeared due to Microsoft monopoly with Haiku making a OSS clone. QNX was at $40 million a year in revenue when Blackberry bought it. Green Hills and VxWorks are doing OK, too, with VxWorks making more than QNX per quarter. Both have desktops virtualizing Windows, Linux, etc on microkernels w/ Gbps throughput. I don't see why we keep getting these theoretical counters given the proven results of microkernel performance in the field. Tell me why microkernels are too slow when they can only do this on 90's era hardware: this video Then, tell us why we should sacrifice isolation of malice and faults in favor of kernel-mode code with properties like this: [LINK] Our side produced highly reliable and secure systems plus high-performance systems. It was always done with a small group with little time. The monoliths took a decade and thousands of man hours to do the same. It's up to you people to justify why those hours were well-spent. "while for say an exokernel the opposite is mostly true." An exokernel is a microkernel...
Futurama reference ;) [LINK] though apparently popular enough that some people have made all-rush playlists ( [LINK] ) On-topic - definitely a cool project and one that I haven't heard about actually, added to my queue of weekly source-code readings. I'd also consider DirectFB similar, and another project that I just have in my vaguest of memories (think they used a project-name like Cairo that got google-CVed out of existence from the more recent one) from the 2001-02ish era. They tried to attack X back then, but fell victims to the driver situation (but they had arbitrarily rotated windows!). One of my stronger personal influences is BeOS though - Compare this video to [LINK] :)