Why is it that the hardware interfaces of disk drives 30 years ago were simple and clear and they currently require enormously elaborate drivers? Imagine if one could provide a command consisting of
(read/write, diskaddress, buffer_address, count, notification_address)
so that the disk drive controller wrote a completion code in the notification_address when done. Would that be hard? Why is it that virtualization hardware on modern processors devotes tens of millions of transistors to functionality that is not useful in any sensible virtual machine kernel but makes interrupt emulation into a nightmarish mish mash. Why are obvious bottlenecks in multi-core performance, like snooping caches made more an more elaborate and non-deterministic in operation when it’s been known for 30 years that they don’t scale at all? Why is it that the painfully obvious design flaws of USB can never be corrected even as it becomes more and more unavoidable?
Eventually, we’ll reach a breaking point where someone builds a Corolla or a Tesla and the manufacturers of power guzzling, unreliable, legacy hardware have to scramble to catch up.
I do systems software, also at very low level (TLB, and interrupts routing, and … “root mode” too … ).
I track you – since the time I discovered your “Against priority inheritance” (also, an experience of mine own), and then this “keeping simple”
I also share your stance that I don’t understand virtualization hype, in general, and Intel’s stake in it, in general, … and equivalence of VM and (a method of) “guaranteed security” …
Just wanted to share with you my admiration for you staying the sane way, in consistent big picture of what the computing means and is, and what is just technical vehicle to have it done in indefinitely simple, reliable, ever satisfying and enjoying endeavour
(or, simply said: effective, productive, efficient) that people take,
always in comparison, or relative to, other sound endeavours throughout cultures and histories …
A real enigma I cannot answer is still (after 50+ years) present crude division of hardware and software, an amazing separation (in corporations businesses, in job descriptions, in college curricula, …) that creates suboptimal global solutions and poorly understood systems,
after all years of computers – and, now, it broils down to kWh and the proofs of lowering the global cost minimum including the number of (someone’s but not everyone’s) kWh – amazing, isn’t it …