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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."
Principles
To achieve these goals, we propose a distributed operating system built on the principles of aggressive abstraction, storage-irrelevance, location-irrelevance, just-in-time binding, and introspection:
Aggressive abstraction. The level of abstraction should be raised to the point that application programmers are freed from the mechanics of distributed programming and the exigencies of physical computing components. This would allow them to focus on application concerns--actually solving a problem for a user--rather than system concerns such as communication or fault tolerance. To the greatest extent possible, the system should handle difficult issues like data placement, resource location, fault-tolerance, and load-balancing.
Storage-irrelevance. There should be no storage hierarchy. Once created, information should be accessible until it is no longer needed or referenced.
Location-irrelevance. Objects should be allowed to reference each other and invoke operations without regard for their current location or replication state. The system should have a seamless appearance despite its underlying distributed nature.
Just-in-time binding. Bindings to particular computations, data, and hardware resources should be made only when actually required, preventing applications from creating bindings that would interfere with distribution or fault tolerance. Computations or data could be arbitrarily duplicated and bindings made to one instance would be equivalent to bindings to other instances. Just-in-time binding would enhance resource access and management as the operating system could redirect access to a resource at any time or for any reason to an equivalent entity.
Introspection. The system should possess some aspects of self-examination and reflection. It should pervasively monitor itself and its applications, and reason about configuration and performance issues. Its models of its own configuration and operation should suggest opportunities for self-tuning as well as generate suggestions for physical configuration changes or upgrades that would improve performance.
I notice that Microsoft are busy inventing again...
*sigh*
Had to. Sorry.