Your computer is a distributed system

Re:Your computer is a distributed system by aseipp on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @02:06PM (#30858680)

A good paper giving a concrete example of all this is "A fork() in the road", where you can see how an API just like fork(2) has an absolutely massive amount of ramifications on the overall design of the system, to the point "POSIX compliance" resulted in some substantial perversions of the authors' non-traditional OS design, all of which did nothing but add complexity and failure modes ("oh, but I thought UNIX magically gave you simplicity and made everything easy?") It also has significantly diverged from its "simple" original incarnation in the PDP-11 to a massive complex beast. So you can add "CreateProcess(), not fork()" on the list of things NT did better, IMO.

And that's just a single system call, albeit a very important one. People simply vastly overestimate how rose-tinted their glasses are and all the devils in the details, until they actually get into the nitty gritty of it all.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...

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Re:Your computer is a distributed system by nyanpasu64 on Thursday March 31, 2022 @12:11AM (#30863734)

I agree that fork (a Unix implementation detail) creates issues like overcommit and complicating memory management (took a look at the paper and I won't dispute the issues it points out). I don't agree that farming out in-app functionality into a herd of daemons (d-bus, desktop portals, pipewire, pipewire-pulse, wireplumber, system and user systemd with daemon-level environment variables) is beneficial for system functionality and doesn't create added complexity (each daemon's state, which daemons are running or crashed, reliance on IPC instead of being able to trace each process in isolation) and new failure modes (apps can't find D-Bus to load the desktop portal, and hang instead, if you login to Wayfire unless you login to Xfce first without killing systemd --user).

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