Operating Systems of the Future

An anonymous reader writes: "'Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration.' Computerworld is predicting that over the next 10 years, operating systems will become highly distributed and 'self-healing,' and they'll collaborate with applications, making application programmers' jobs easier."

Comments

Amoeba

[oyving]

Tanenbaums Amoeba is way ahead of the game then.

As long as...

[BoarderPhreak]

...This software isn't like Office X from Microsoft on the Mac where it scans your network for anti-piracy measures, but in the process opens up your machine wide to the Internet by opening several ports... Worse yet, not tell anyone about it!

Grumble, grumble...

Re:Scalability problems, anyone?

[Salamander]

Surely there will be major scalability problems with something like this, a la Gnutella

That's why it's research. I've met and talked to Bill Bolosky (Farsite project lead); he's very clueful wrt scalability in general, and well aware of the problems that networks like Gnutella (an unusually naive protocol, BTW) have run into. However, like the folks working on OceanStore or CFS or many other projects, the Farsite folks have a fairly formidable arsenal of innovative techniques they can apply to the problem. The details are still being worked out, of course, because that's what research is all about, but the people working in this area do seem to be making real progress toward solutions that could scale to such levels.

Re:Mod Me Down If I'm Wrong.....

[Salamander]

The idea of my files being stored on some Iowa farmhands computer does not sit well with me...
...The only real security is hardware security, which is to say, my files on my machine, your files on your machine

The first statement above makes perfect sense if you consider the second as axiomatic. However, the people working on these types of systems don't accept that axiom. Instead, they believe that cryptography-based security is just as strong as physical security...the odds that someone will factor a couple of hundred-digit numbers (or accomplish some equally difficult mathematical feat) are no higher than that they'll break into your home/office and steal your hardware. If they're right then there should be no problem with storing your files on some Iowa farmhand's computer (so long as you also have other replicas elsewhere for availability purposes), because Iowa Farmboy still can't access or modify your data without the right keys.

That's a big "if" you say. Well, yes it is. But if you want to make an argument that hardware security is the only real security, you'll need to show that cryptographically based systems aren't as secure as skilled and experienced implementors of such systems seem to think. Good luck.