Adopt a Lost Technology Today For R.O.S.

submitted by Simon Strandgaard writes "When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate." This is all for R.O.S., a "ruby-centric operating system."

Comments

Re: kernel/userspace separation

[some guy I know]

I'd like to see the end of the kernel/userspace separation. Just put everything in one address space.

You mean like MS-Windows?

With safe languages, there is no need for it.

The problem with "safe" languages is that the underlying system can be used for such odious purposes as D"R"M, and there is no way to get around it.
And you would have to have a "safe"-language-only policy on such a system, or you would have a security nightmare similar to that of MS-Windows.
(I certainly wouldn't want to use such a system; I like C, even though I usually use Python (a "safe" language).)

Performance could be enhanced by doing more things in libraries (e.g., a ramdisk used exclusively by one application (or a limited set of mutually-trusted/ing applications) could be supported entirely in userspace, with no context-switching necessary).
Or several mutually-trusting/ed intercommunicating apps could share the same address space, so no VM remapping would be necessary when switching from one to another, nor would a system call be necessary.
(This would be kind of like a lightweight thread mechanism, but different threads could be loaded from different binaries.)

I don't know if any of this would actually be feasible, though, since I haven't really worked on the guts of an OS for about 20 years.