Microsoft's Vision For Future Operating Systems

Bender writes: "The Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research has a fascinating article that details what sorts of things they believe may be important in Operating Systems of the 21st century."

Comments

/.'s MS icon has never seemed more appropriate...

[ncc74656]

From the bullet list of the researchers' goals:

Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated.

The next generation of application....

[ajs]

• Seamless distribution. The system should determine where computations execute or data resides, moving them dynamically as necessary.

  **FLASH**
  Redmond, WA -- Today a new computer clone (see "When Did We Stop Calling Them Virii") was released today by the hacker group, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". As is now typical of clones, it spreads by convincing millions of desktops around the world that it should be moved onto their processors for milliseconds at a time....

• Worldwide scalability. Logically there should be only one system, although at any one time it may be partitioned into many pieces.

  ...researcher at M.I.T. says that it's nearly impossible to stop "She Bop", due in part to the fact that it's not technically "spreading", so much as it's simply "running"...

• Fault-tolerance. The system should transparently handle failures or removal of machines, network links, and other resources without loss of data or functionality.

  ...even the most drastic measures have been discarded as impractical. Said one security expert, "if you took down all of the computers in the world but one, it would remain on that one last computer, until the rest were back up."...

• Self-tuning. The system should be able to reason about its computations and resources, allocating, replicating, and moving computations and data to optimize its own performance, resource usage, and fault-tolerance.

  ...The effects of this clone seem to be somewhat benign. For the most part, it just convinces the systems that it runs on that they should run all of the normal programs on Department of Energy systems instead...

• Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated.

  ...One negative impact, however is that the last vestiges of the "open source" operating system networks in foreign countries (they are illegal, here in the U.S.) are being starved for network bandwidth because of what authorities are calling "quality of service feedback noise" which is apparently convincing all major "backbone" carriers (Sprint, AOL/AT&T and McDonalds/Worldcom) that they need to set asside more and more resources for upcoming games of MMHearts (Microsoft's hit game from last year, which combines massively multiplayer games with the most used program of all time)....

• Security. Although a single system image is presented, data and computations may be in many different trust domains, with different rights and capabilities available to different security principals.

  ...In response to this latest event, the Justice department has said that they may petition the NSA for a copy of the Microsoft U.S. Trust Key, which would give the department ultimate control over all deployed operating systems. When asked if this was a temporary measure, Dr. Reno, III responded, "I can't see why we could need to use the key again, but it would probably be prudent of us to keep it for now...

• Resource controls. Both providers and consumers may explicitly manage the use of resources belonging to different trust domains. For instance, while some people might be content to allow their data and computations to use any resources available anywhere, some companies might choose, for instance, not to store or compute their year-end financial statement on their competitor?s machines.
  What!? You thought I could come up with a witty way to make fun of that statement?! I'm not a magician!

Yep, this'll be fun. Where do I buy the popcorn?