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It is http://www.dz.ru/en/solutions/phantom#06 http://www.dz.ru/en/solutions/phantom/why/

It is http://www.dz.ru/en/solutions/phantom#06 http://www.dz.ru/en/solutions/phantom/why/

Guys, thanx for an interesting comments. I wrote some short doc about Phantom's ideas, here: http://dz.ru/en/documents/dz_phantom_whitepaper_06Feb2009_00.doc Still a brief sketch, but it can narrow the discussion a bit. :)

There's little or nothing original that's being presented here. The Phantom people claim originality to the idea of orthogonal persistence, but they are flat-out wrong:

Q: File system?

A: Nope. Sorry. Nobody needs files in Phantom. All the operating system state is saved across shutdowns. Phantom is the only global persistent OS in the world, AFAIK. All the state of all the objects is saved. Even power failure is not a problem, because of the unique Phantom's ability to store frequently its complete state on the disk.

To illustrate the utility and awesomeness of persistence, there's a famous story about KeyKOS, an earlier OS that embraced this notion:

At the 1990 uniforum vendor exhibition, key logic, inc. found that their booth was next to the novell booth. Novell, it seems, had been bragging in their advertisements about their recovery speed. Being basically neighborly folks, the key logic team suggested the following friendly challenge to the novell exhibitionists: let's both pull the plugs, and see who is up and running first.

Now one thing Novell is not is stupid. They refused.

Somehow, the story of the challenge got around the exhibition floor, and a crowd assembled. Perhaps it was gremlins. Never eager to pass up an opportunity, the keykos staff happily spent the next hour kicking their plug out of the wall. Each time, the system would come back within 30 seconds (15 of which were spent in the bios prom, which was embarassing, but not really key logic's fault). Each time key logic did this, more of the audience would give novell a dubious look.

Eventually, the novell folks couldn't take it anymore, and gritting their teeth they carefully turned the power off on their machine, hoping that nothing would go wrong. As you might expect, the machine successfully stopped running. Very reliable.

Having successfully stopped their machine, novell crossed their fingers and turned the machine back on. 40 minutes later, they were still checking their file systems. Not a single useful program had been started.

Figuring they probably had made their point, and not wanting to cause undeserved embarassment, the keykos folks stopped pulling the plug after five or six recoveries.

The notion of a language-based OS exploiting the semantics of pointerless/"safe" programming languages in order to isolate processes, rather than the norm of executing untrusted native machine code in different address spaces, is nothing new either.

If these ideas shift your bits, take a look at some real, interesting work done by real people that have more clue than fashion:

• Coyotos, an OS whose orthogonal persistence falls out of the capability model of security that they embrace. Coyotos is written in BitC, a purpose-built high-level programming language with special focus on formal semantics and reasoning.
• Singularity, a language-based OS in development by none other than Microsoft Research. (Certainly the most interesting Microsoft project that I am aware of.) Singularity exploits language semantics to isolate processes.
• TUNES, a collective wet-dream of what the OS, programming language, and generally computing system of tomorrow should look like. With all due respect towards the insurmountable difficulty and endless complexity of a task like this, it must be said that TUNES is just vaporware.

From the faq:
"The most unusual Phantom property is its hybrid paging/persistence system. All the userland memory is mapped to disk and is frequently snapped. Snapshot logic is tied with the common paging logis so that snapshots are done cheap way."

From that, it sounds like it constantly snaps what's in RAM to something like a pagefile?
That's got to affect HD performance if it's basically always writing to the disk.

It's nice for powering down your machine, but honestly I'd rather have a "hibernate" button that makes me wait five seconds than making my machine drag while I'm actively using it.

So my system is running a dinosaur?
Sorry, no.

Also, i don't really think this will work good.
Im not an computer expert or anything, but copying everything from RAM to HD could hurt performence and stuff.


I hate how he clearly targets linux here
I think linux is way better then any windows (Thats what I think). Also his stuff is still vaporware and he is talking like he owns the OS market...

I would like this (concept) if it where open source...
Many devs = Succes and a better(?) linux.

Screenshots can be faked: user@phantom$ But according to this page, it's about 90% unimplemented. Someone please tag the article 'vaporware'.

Sounds lucrative.. not!

At first, when I read the OP's post, I thought he was being harsh. Then I actually read TFA, and here are some highlights:

Q: Is Phantom a POSIX-compliant system?
A: No. It is possible to layer POSIX subsystem above the Phantom native environment, but it is not an idea per se.

Q: OS is based on VM â" does it mean that not all the possible programming languages will be supported?
A: Yes. Say goodbye to C and Assembler. On the other side, everything is in Java or C# now, or even in some even more dynamic language, such as Javascript or even PHP. All these languages will be supported.

Then it also has a special ASM language called "Phantasm". Looking over the example code, the question "Why?" kept flashing in my brain.

Ah, then we come to Why a new os?:

The most obvious questions: why new operating system? Isnâ(TM)t Linux enough? Of course, Linux is not enough. Being a clone of Unix, Linux conceptually is a dinosaur. Donâ(TM)t be happy, Windows guys, Windows is not really far away. Lets see, what is wrong with todayâ(TM)s popular operating systems.
    >> OO-Friendly? No!
    >> Network friendly? No!
    >> Simple? No.
    >> Communication friendly? No!
    >> Future friendly? No!

Okay, so according to the guy who created it, OS's should be simple, oo-friendly (my mom always says "Hey, stinky, why isn't my computer more object oriented?" (wtf?no), and future friendly? The guy must be just another cracked out developer..

Thanks but no.

Frankly you are thinking like an old operating system.

How does it handle locking conflicts? Well, think about it, how do you handle locking conflicts in your program? That is your answer.

The idea from this Phantom OS is that you don't need to think about "paging", or "locking conflicts" etc. You only need to think about your objects that are serialized to the system. Contention? Well create a server process. Think Erlang...

Here is I think his link...

http://www.dz.ru/en/solutions/phantom/