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by mardifoufs 380 days ago
Considering that a lot of people use their OS just to navigate the web, you could use the logic you are applying here to argue that the browser should be an OS provided component. Plus, networking is one of the easiest things to move to userland. An OS is still extremely useful for everything else, so I'm not sure I see your point
1 comments
anonymousiam 380 days ago
I don't believe it's my responsibility to cover these basic concepts here, but the role of the OS is to abstract the hardware from the applications.

All browsers are applications, regardless of what Microsoft argued in their 1998 anti-trust suit defense.

The OS knows how to talk to your networking hardware, and it provides services for the applications to do so, and even implements some standard protocols so the applications don't need to do that.

This is all very basic stuff, but I've been out of school for many decades, so maybe they don't teach it anymore.

https://www.theringer.com/2018/05/18/tech/microsoft-antitrus...

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mardifoufs 380 days ago
What? Don't worry, I understand "the basic concepts". It's just that you yourself said that it was about a philosophy so it's weird to claim that disagreeing with said philosophy is just ignorance.

Also, I'm not sure you understand what quic is then? The kernel still handles most of the hardware abstraction, and in most cases still interacts exclusively with the hardware at the driver level (except for very high performance networking).

Yes, it can also help with protocols, but even going by your own definition ("but the role of the OS is to abstract the hardware from the applications"), protocols don't have to be at the kernel level.

You missed my original point, providing a browser was obviously an exaggerated example of doing more than just abstracting and handling the hardware. Which is also what implementing protocols at the kernel level is. The kernel still handles QUIC's UDP layer (and thus the hardware).

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tptacek 380 days ago
It's not even true that kernels universally handle hardware abstraction! Their argument is an overgeneralization of what Linux and WinNT happen to do.
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mardifoufs 380 days ago
Yes exactly, I completely agree! I was about to say that, but even with that rather restrictive definition it still doesn't make sense to want things like QUIC anywhere else but in userland.

But whenever I hear about "philosophy" in a discussion about kernels, I just default to assuming that they mean "whatever Linux does is the right way™".

But hey, I should've just skipped my kernel courses since they didn't teach me a lot about "kernel philosophy" lol.

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tptacek 380 days ago
Could you maybe explain it to David D. Clark too? He appears not to have learned it at school either.
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