Operating system research - 16 years perspective
It’s somewhat funny and somewhat sad to read this thread on the old USENET. Starting out with Andy Tanenbaum’s proposed list of accepted truths (most of which I thought wrong at the time)
GENERALLY ACCEPTED AS TRUE BY RESEARCHERS IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
- - The client-server paradigm is a good one
- - Microkernels are the way to go
- - UNIX can be successfully run as an application program
- - RPC is a good idea to base your system on
- - Atomic group communication (broadcast) is highly useful
- - Caching at the file server is definitely worth doing
- - File server replication is an idea whose time has come
- - Message passing is too primitive for application programmers to use
- - Synchronous (blocking) communication is easier to use than asynchronous
- - New languages are needed for writing distributed/parallel applications
- - Distributed shared memory in one form or another is a convenient model
and then Rob Pike’s refutation entitled “Andy Tanenbaum hasn’t learned anything”. A key point that comes up later in the discussion is Tanenbaum’s (incorrect) assertion that a “factor of two” performace loss is nothing to worry about. The date of the discussion is interesting, because in a few years the Linux Tsunami washed away most of the landscape of this discussion. As for my contribution it is very disturbing to see that I have not learned much about those topics in the last 14 16 years.
It is clear that Rob Pike was right on many more issues than AST, but that seemed clear at the time too.
[edited to reflect the passage of time]