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Will Pervasive Multithreading Make a Comeback?
exigentsky writes "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that, like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls, and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other major OS that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"
Given that most machines are already starting to come default with 2 cores, and you can fit 8 cores (2 CPUs) in a nice desktop package, it's pretty clear that it's going to be a requirement.
It's not entirely the operating system's fault. The biggest advance of BeOS wasn't necessarily just that the kernel was designed to multithread nicely, Be also did their best to force you to write multithreaded code when you wrote a Be application.
I suspect that the first thing that's going to become clearly a performance bottleneck is the applications. And that's not going to be fun, because there's a lot of applications out there and you can't just magically recompile them with threads turned on and see much difference. You need to synchronize the data structures for multiple threads touching them at the same time and split things up so that you can actually keep a decent number of cores busy. This is not trivial when you are talking about an app that somebody wrote single threaded in the mid 90s without any notion that threads might be useful later.
Gentoo Sucks
I believe that's covered by "There were a few architectural decisions in BeOS that I felt would have resulted in great amounts of pain and suffering 10 years later."
Rewriting things from the ground up, without acceptable justification, has never been an effective strategy.
Gentoo Sucks
128MB? In the mid 80s? Maybe you mean 4Mb :-)
Vista, George W. Bush, elected because of his name, even though the prior iteration wasn't especially respected or well-liked. Introduced instability and performance issues, all in the name of "security". Many of the corporate interests who promoted him early on are having second thoughts.
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
An operating system's job is to mediate access to hardware and software resources. The fact that every modern OS is madly bloated is just proof that the world's OS developers are ADHD suburban twits getting lazy and gratuitous with fluffy GUI features, when really they should be focusing on two core things: device drivers and the almighty scheduler.
Just think about it: Windows Vista is, on average, 10% slower than XP for generic tasks and gaming. Why the hell is that ? Someone fucked with the kernel and stuck things in it that don't belong there, like that ever-annoying popup security model.
It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!
The BeOS guys probably had a plan, along with some good brains and coding skill, and they stuck to that plan. If a feature isn't in the plan, it doesn't get coded; the system stays lean and fast, and you let the application developers handle all the shiny stuff. That's how it used to be, and still is in some circles... but not Windows nor Linux. That's where we went wrong.
-Billco, Fnarg.com