The Microsoft Singularity

jose parinas writes ""Microsoft Research has published the first details of a wholly new operating system under development called Singularity, designed new from the ground up, built on a new language and designed with emphasis on dependability instead of performance.""

Comments

pseudo-academics should be careful what they bash

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually read any of the papers?

I am an OS academic, and we take Microsoft Research seriously, because they're fucking good.

HotOS is a pretty serious workshop for Operating Systems research. Microsoft Research, among others, pays for the conference room. Singularity isn't far enough long yet to get into a bigger conference like SOSP or OSDI, but you can be sure it will in a year or two.

I wouldn't call Singularity pseudo-academic.

Re:Define "innovation" in that context.

[zootm]

Try checking out the Microsoft Research page, and their past systems stemming from there. You might be surprised.

Re:Define "innovation" in that context.

[devilsadvoc8]

The relentless bashing of Microsoft in this manner is tiring. Have they made flawed products? Absolutely, but to generalize their contribution to modern computing as nothing more than theft and good marketing is pure garbage. However such posts are good at karma whoring...

Re:Papers?

[Kupek]

I don't understand your complaint. They wrote some papers about their research project, why wouldn't they put them on their site? Before you dismiss the quality of the papers, you want to actually read them.

Built on a new language?

[PCM2]

As far as I can see, the language in question is not exactly "new" anymore, being C#. In other words, this is sort of a demo OS written in a managed-code environment as a way to test various OS principles (which in this case sound a lot like the virtualization stuff that so many other vendors are also doing). Singularity seems like the equivalent of writing an operating system in Java for a school project.

Re:Built on a new language?

[Coryoth]

As far as I can see, the language in question is not exactly "new" anymore, being C#.

Actually its an extended version of Spec# which is in turn an extension of C#. It might help to acquaint yourself with what that actually means. The first significant different is that Spec# allows for explicit pre and post conditions and other formal specificiation syntax, and hence allows for model checking, extended static checking, and formal proof if required.

It's more like someone writing an OS in BitC because it can be formally verified and hence be more secure. It does make sense, and there is good logic behind it. Comparing it to an OS in Java is just silly. Comparing it to an OS written in Java using JML and associated theorem provers is getting a little closer. Of course that doesn't address the issue of designing the OS to be more secure and reliable from the outset, and not just relying on formal verification.

If you actually bothered to read some of the material on Singularity you would see that it is an ambitious, but remarkably interesting and promising project. It is also, I would expect, something that will permanently remain buried in MS research like so many other projects. I would be interested in seeing a good open source equivalent though - such a project might have some hope of surviving.

Jedidiah.

Re:This just in MS sucks...already Slash Dotted

[The Bungi]

Just goes to show what IIS and SQL Server will do for you....

Wow, and the last time I saw a /.'ed site spewing MySQL and Apache errors I thought it was just me. Because, well, I've heard that using open source will automagically upgrade your DSL to a T3. Free!

Moron.

Re:another longhorn?

[Jerry Coffin]

Come to think of it - has MS EVER written their own OS from scratch?

Better question: when's the last time anybody wrote an OS from scratch?

As far as I can see, the answer to that is really "never". Before there were OSes, there were collections of macros to act like device drivers and such. The first OSes were based on those, and added slightly more uniform interfaces and such.

Pretty much everything since can be traced back to something previous.

DOS - Borrowed from Tim Patterson's QDOS.

Windows - Shell extention to DOS

Xenix - AT&T/Berkley clone

OS/2 - Co-built with IBM

NT / XP / Vista - Built off of OS/2

DOS 1.0 was based on QDOS, but DOS 2.0 was essentially a complete rewrite that was really based much more closely on UNIX than on QDOS.

In fairness it should also be added that QDOS was based on (according to some, just a re-compile of) CP/M. Lest any CP/Mers get all holier-than-thou about it, in his original announcement letter about it to "Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia", Gary Kildall openly stated that CP/M was derived from DEC RT/11. I'll assume there aren't enough DECies left to bother debunking the notion that RT/11 was entirely original.

I'd say the others are much the same way: on one hand, MS contributed more originality than you imply, and on the other hand, others contributed less than you imply.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

I hope they market this SOB

[WhiteWolf666]

Thoughts:

1. Be nice to have some real competition versus Linux/OS X in terms of architecture. XP/2003 just aren't there. Vista won't be, most likely.
2. Where such a beast (research OS) ever to become a product, would it demonstrate a high level of backwards compatibility? If not, would it actually have to compete on merits, rather than vendor lock-in?
3. It's taken ~10 years to write Wine to the point where it is in _beta_. Now, I'm sure MS can do it faster, because they have the documentation; after all, they designed it. But how long will it take? Or will they use a virtual machine architecture?

In any case, if MS switches to an entirely different OS architecture, I forsee the end of the MS monopoly. Release of a non-Win32 based OS, one that runs older applications (either desktop OR server) in emulation validates Linux/OS with QEMU/Virtual PC/VMware/Xen/Whatever.

4. I doubt this will ever leave the lab. Singularity will be a test bed for MS researchers who want to play with various concepts. These things will be ported over to Vista, or whatever comes into the future. I cannot imagine a world in which MS actually started from scratch; having to market such a product against mainline-Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD would be pure madness. It's already extremely difficult for MS to push Office against older versions of Office; this has generated substantial pressure towards alternative Office packages.

It'll be significantly harder for MS to push towards a non-Windows MS operating system. Every single CIO willing to consider moving from Windows will be willing to consider moving to Linux/OS X/whatever instead.

Re:another longhorn?

[LLuthor]

I am going to be modded troll for this I am sure, but I have to say it anyway.

How many OSes have ever been written from scratch?

I can think of only 3, none of which has even 0.1% market share. In fact, Plan9 is the only one of them alive.

What is the big deal with bashing microsoft for copying ideas from people?

Isn't that what OSS is built around, copying good ideas?

Re:another longhorn?

[shmlco]

You mean the way the FOSS community has managed to reinvent Unix from 30 to 40 years earlier? Yay for progress!

Seriously, ALL operating systems borrow concepts from earlier versions and the existing state of the art. Trying to determine the degree (or not) of "innovation" is akin to arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, with no prior agreement as to the size of an angel...

Re:Papers?

[GileadGreene]

Please keep in mind that MS Research is quite a different beast than the production departments of MS. MS Research does a lot of respected work. They also employ some of the most reputable researchers in software and OS development, including:

• Tony Hoare (quicksort, CSP, Hoare logic, among other things)
• Leslie Lamport (TLA+, the bakery algorithm, the byzantine generals problem, LaTeX, among other things)
• Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell, many things FP)
• Luca Cardelli (many things in type theory and PL semantics)
• Eric Meijer (many things FP)

I dislike MS production software and business practices as much as the next guy. But don't make the mistake of underestimating MS Research just because you dislike MS.

Heres one:

[0kComputer]

How about IXMLHTTPRequest, or what everyone now so fondly calls AJAX now that its all the rave.

Re:apples and oranges

[cartman]

Singularity is built on a microkernel. EROS is built on a microkernel.

You completely misunderstood the point of Singularity. The point of Singularity is that all code (except OS code) is subject to verification, and any code that isn't verifiable is runtime bounds-checked. Furthermore, in Singularity, inter-process communication is structured, such that the OS can verify IPC traffic. Furthermore, the languages for Singularity are strongly typed at the object code level, and garbage collection is performed by the OS--explicit deallocation is impossible for any application. These facilities make it impossible for any application to have buffer overruns, segfaults, or overruns of other apps' data--as a result, all applications can run in ring 0 and virtual memory is not required.

All that has nothing whatsoever to do with Eros. The two projects are not even similar.

Of course a verifier could be written as an application for Eros (or for DOS, for that matter). That statement is like saying that C++ is no different from assembly, because they're both built atop similar hardware and can be used to implement the same things.

Not that you know what developing on an EROS-like system is like, considering it's a completely revolutionary architecture comparable only to KeyKOS from which it's derived.

The Coyotos OS is based on Eros and is quite similar. Additionally, Eros is not completely revolutionary. From the eros web page, What's new about Eros?: "Each of these faclities is...essential to providing scalable reliability, and all of them have appeared in prior systems. No prior system, however, has ... this particular combination ... in quite the same way.".

Not that you know what developing on an EROS-like system is like

Your arrogance is unjustified.