[bakatubas]

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.