On 2024-08-09 13:36, Kent Borg wrote:
On 8/6/24 10:03, Dan Ritter wrote:
The rise of virtual machines and containers is an admission of
systemic failure: people gave up on managing dependencies in a
sensible manner.
I've always considered the reason to be that the traditional idea of
what services an OS should offer has become tattered. But your version
gets to the heart of that in a nice way. And there is more going on
(going wrong) here.
The OS clearly isn't doing enough to manage dependencies if people
prefer what BIOSÂ offers (or I guess UEFI these days) to what the OS
offers. A mark of failure for the OS.
My CS education left out "System Virtual Machines" (as defined by
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine). When I hear
or read "VM", I think of "Process Virtual Machines" - which were always
useful as intermediate targets during compilation and/or interpreters
(p-code or the WAM for Prolog).
The job of the OS (as I understood it) was to manage the HW, and the
first OS I used that effectively virtualized the CPU and memory was Unix
on "worksations". MacOS and DOS just didn't compare anymore.
I can see the utility of System VMs on servers, but not something I'd
use every day.
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