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by ksec 1817 days ago
Not an expert on OS development subject, but are there anything really new? ( Apart from eBPF )

Almost all the change log in Linux are Drivers and File Systems. And anything there is new to Linux seems to have come from other OS like Solaris. You have Minix in every Intel chip or seL4 for specific uses.

I mean Windows 11 I was hoping Microsoft would share something about new kernel update or something. or Apple macOS which seems to be in the direction of moving everything to userspace.

Are there anything that is really new that didn't get any coverage?
2 comments
hughrr 1817 days ago
I think that stuff is fairly “done” now.

What is really the point of computing is the interaction and capabilities for the end user which is where the commercial focus is.

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bakatubas 1817 days ago
Nowadays everything is layers on top of layers. File systems from regular partitions and RAID to LVM then to ZFS/Btrfs. Virtualization of OS systems to KVM/Qemu to containers.

Operating systems function now in general is to provide a means for running arbitrary systems on top of the metal. It’s astonishing what one can do with cloud-init and a base Linux install these days. I can botch up all the layers above and quickly restart without installing anything on the base system install.

Granted, there’s always special cases but I see that “stable core” over which anything can run to be the target. Just look at the M1 chip—designed to run virtualized architectures efficiently.

So, to reiterate my point, Operating systems should target virtualization/abstraction features as efficiently as possible so it doesn’t matter which OS or workload folks run, or where it’s running (cloud, IoT, desktop, laptop, server, etc).

An additional area requiring research is security. Process obfuscation of some kind to prevent tampering etc there are still work to be done.

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agumonkey 1817 days ago
there were some kernel level new things in the last decade, nothing earth shattering, but interrupt coalescing was pretty nice, I remember seeing a few news like this over the years (some coming from MS first even:)
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