Microsoft's Vision For Future Operating Systems

Bender writes: "The Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research has a fascinating article that details what sorts of things they believe may be important in Operating Systems of the 21st century."

/.'s MS icon has never seemed more appropriate...

From the bullet list of the researchers' goals:

Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated.

They really do want us all!!!

The article actually says that one of the goals is "Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated."

Translated: "Microsoft will take over every machine you put your filthy little hands on. Nyah!"

And it gets worse... "The administrator inserts a Millennium installation DVD disk into one of the machines and the system propagates across the network. After evaluating the network topology and hardware resources, Millennium might suggest that one of the more powerful machines (a "server") be moved to a different network location for best performance."

Translated: "Windows Millenium will infest your entire network whether you like it or not. Then, it will hunt out the Linux machines and demand that it be installed on those as well."

Now if those aren't goals of a company that plans on taking over the universe, I don't know what are....

Old article

That article is so old the project is over already. Still interesting to think about, though.

ack

... so that individual computers, file systems, and networks become unimportant to most computations in the same way that processor registers, disk sectors, and physical pages are today.


so they want to turn their entire user-base into an application? (bear with me) ... MS must get sick and tired of "borg" references, but this appears a tad too close to the mark.

it seems the only way you could have this level of hands-off "use-ability" would be to have complete control of all aspects of the hardware and enviroments your software is running under ... (simple if everyone was using a microsoft computer and held a microsoft job).

this seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. if we move to a level of abstraction devoid of details, how can we possibly innovate and improve?

_f

define irony

Anyone taken a close look at that address, in light of recent behavior by MS?

Microsoft [Unit]

One Microsoft Way

Redmond WA

("My way or the highway"-reminiscent)

Developers - stop bashing and start coding

There are some sound ideas here for future directions in Linux development - and they've already been thought up for you here.

One big problem Linux development will face is the notion that devs are playing catch-up with MS with projects like Mono. (We blast Microsoft for its claim that it is an innovator, but has there been much innovation in Linux kernel devlelopment lately?) Instead of trying to build a Windows clone, we should build up a system that addresses computing in a way that MS system's dont.

Latency is a killer

There are some good ideas here, but they seem to disregard the problem of latency. The speed of light, unfortunately, isn't likely to be overcome any time soon, and people notice when there is a 50ms delay every time they press a key, move their mouse, etc.

Some applications can be distributed, sure, but there will always be a need for interactive applications to run locally, on local data.

Operating systems should go away.

The 'Conventional Wisdom' is that operating systems should do *exactly* three things.

Manage memory

Manage CPU time (schedule processes)

Manage access to hardware

And that's what an operating system *kernel* does.

Operating systems do not need to:

provide compilers, web browsers, colossal text editors (MS Word and emacs included)

inform users of the *really* important reasons they need to upgrade *now*

do GUI shit.

If you use a computer, you want it to do what you want. Most of the time, you want it to help you manage information. Most users don't even know that their computer *has* an operating system. Most users know that it's a really useful typewriter with an 'undo' facility.

What OS does your fridge run? your car? your microwave oven? your alarm system?

Those are all von Neumann machines, running operating systems.

A computer in a home/business environment should be useful, usable and reliable.

Get this. It's important. The people who buy computers couldn't give a flying fuck about the OS. Some want 'applications'. Those people are called 'IT managers'. Most want information. They are called 'people'.

I do *not* want my dishwasher to stop with a message of "Oops in module handle_detergent. Please run ksymoops and report to lkml". I don't want my television to go blue with advice to 'set CRASHDEBUG' for some purpose.

If you know that you are running an operating system, you are either an OS hacker, or the OS hackers have failed to protect you from their work.

Please read the paper before posting. It's short.

I really do hope that people read the entire paper before posting their thoughts about it. I hate Microsoft with a passion -- my first thought upon hearing about the WTC attack was, "Those poor people! I sure hope Bill Gates was in there." -- but the points they've raised here are valid ones and deserve analysis. The topic is an important one and I hope people will not malign it because of the source, namely, Microsoft.

That said, I'll comment on the paper itself. They have a point, somewhat understated, which is basically, "Yeah, this may be crazy, but it's worth looking into, isn't it?" One obvious response is that it sure seems to be What Microsoft Wants in terms of a homogenized global system that Microsoft controls. Though such a thing is never specifically said, it is called the "Millennium" system, and the ME in Windows ME stands for "Millennium Edition" (side note, it just occurred to me that "Windows ME" could be said with the same tone, inflection, and connotation as "Fuck me!" as an expression of dismay -- "Go Windows yourself!").

Well, who knows, but their idea of a transparent large-scale network that is self-managing as they've described is an interesting one, and there are some things that would be appropriate in such a system. That said, here's several reasons why I think such a system will not happen in the near future:

1. Too much resistance. This *is* a crazy idea, and even if it could be made to work, most people are used to the idea of "my" computer, "my" data, and everything happening physically *here*, inside this little box under my desk. This will take a long time to get over. Perhaps a gentle transition would help, with more and more things gradually shifting to the Big Network.

2. Games. Games require zero latency - nobody enjoys playing Quake with network lag, let alone system lag. All computations for games and other time-sensitive applications would have to be done pretty much within the physical computer you are using, otherwise the latencies are too great and the game would be unplayable and chunky. Imagine if your 50ms ping time also figured into the video processing!

3. Security. It seems silly to assume people would *want* to walk up to a random machine somewhere and have all their documents streamed to it over the Big Network. For one thing, who knows whether the terminal is secure, or if it's got secret programs installed in it to capture your keystrokes? Using a publicly accessible terminal to get to your private data is a bad idea. Also, critical machines (computers that run public infrastructure, banking systems, military systems, etc.) should obviously not be any part of this kind of transparent system, for the obvious security reasons.

4. Where we work. Telecommuting is, for all the cheerleading, not very common at all. When people do regular business-like work (i.e. office workers writing reports, having meetings, doing whatever) they will want to have everything in the same place, and do it in big chunks at a time. Face-to-face communication with people is also very important to the way business is usually done, though this may change as people get more used to the idea of telecommunicating for business. Being able to "walk up to a computer anywhere" and do work is pointless, because the vast majority of people are not going to WANT to be walking through the mall, window shopping, and decide they need to do some work, so go sit down at a public terminal and start doing work. (Nevermind the security issues, mentioned above.)

5. Monoculture. If we think a Windows monoculture is bad now (and we do -- at least, I do), imagine what happens when every computer in the world is now running this system! On the other hand, if such a system was designed so that anyone could implement their own version of it, then you avoid some monoculture issues, but because you have to have interoperability between the systems, you essentially end up with what we have now -- the Internet, made of multiple differing systems that can still communicate using a common protocol, except the protocol would extend beyond data transfer and into things like distributed processing.

If you've managed to read this far, congratulations! I can recommend a decent novel that incidentally covers this topic (it is not the main focus of the plot, but does figure into it): Permutation City, by Greg Egan. A very good novel with lots of interesting ideas, but it does feature a worldwide network in which you can basically bid on processing power to draw from the global network, so your programs might be running anywhere in the world, but are running securely so that a computer doesn't really know what it's doing, it just executes commands. It doesn't go into much technical detail (like how they manage to have computers execute encrypted code without decrypting it), but it's relevant nonetheless.

The next generation of application....

• Seamless distribution. The system should determine where computations execute or data resides, moving them dynamically as necessary.

  **FLASH**
  Redmond, WA -- Today a new computer clone (see "When Did We Stop Calling Them Virii") was released today by the hacker group, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". As is now typical of clones, it spreads by convincing millions of desktops around the world that it should be moved onto their processors for milliseconds at a time....

• Worldwide scalability. Logically there should be only one system, although at any one time it may be partitioned into many pieces.

  ...researcher at M.I.T. says that it's nearly impossible to stop "She Bop", due in part to the fact that it's not technically "spreading", so much as it's simply "running"...

• Fault-tolerance. The system should transparently handle failures or removal of machines, network links, and other resources without loss of data or functionality.

  ...even the most drastic measures have been discarded as impractical. Said one security expert, "if you took down all of the computers in the world but one, it would remain on that one last computer, until the rest were back up."...

• Self-tuning. The system should be able to reason about its computations and resources, allocating, replicating, and moving computations and data to optimize its own performance, resource usage, and fault-tolerance.

  ...The effects of this clone seem to be somewhat benign. For the most part, it just convinces the systems that it runs on that they should run all of the normal programs on Department of Energy systems instead...

• Self-configuration. New machines, network links, and resources should be automatically assimilated.

  ...One negative impact, however is that the last vestiges of the "open source" operating system networks in foreign countries (they are illegal, here in the U.S.) are being starved for network bandwidth because of what authorities are calling "quality of service feedback noise" which is apparently convincing all major "backbone" carriers (Sprint, AOL/AT&T and McDonalds/Worldcom) that they need to set asside more and more resources for upcoming games of MMHearts (Microsoft's hit game from last year, which combines massively multiplayer games with the most used program of all time)....

• Security. Although a single system image is presented, data and computations may be in many different trust domains, with different rights and capabilities available to different security principals.

  ...In response to this latest event, the Justice department has said that they may petition the NSA for a copy of the Microsoft U.S. Trust Key, which would give the department ultimate control over all deployed operating systems. When asked if this was a temporary measure, Dr. Reno, III responded, "I can't see why we could need to use the key again, but it would probably be prudent of us to keep it for now...

• Resource controls. Both providers and consumers may explicitly manage the use of resources belonging to different trust domains. For instance, while some people might be content to allow their data and computations to use any resources available anywhere, some companies might choose, for instance, not to store or compute their year-end financial statement on their competitor?s machines.
  What!? You thought I could come up with a witty way to make fun of that statement?! I'm not a magician!

Yep, this'll be fun. Where do I buy the popcorn?

Interesting Stuff

While the paper isn't particularly original in it's parts the breadth is impressive. It's a well written, thoughtful piece outlining a smart, adaptable, robust, future computing environment. What makes it notable is that the folks writing it have the resources to actually get underway and aren't simply blue-sky theorizers.

Unfortunately coming from Microsoft most /.'ers will prefer to scream and whine about it, attempt to twist it to demonstrate their own particular MS issue or make more jokes that are usually weak at best.

Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting. Instead most are just blinded by the name MS and have once again congregated for the ritual stoning.

Anyway, /.-correctness aside there are a couple of points that the paper glosses over (amongst many) that I find particularly interesting:

The first is the concept of stateless storage - files are there as long as you need them then eventually wither away when no longer referenced or required. This seems to me a particularly utopian view as I'm regularly realizing that I'm either missing a note I want from long ago (too aggressive purging) or that I've got so much material on something that it's becoming burdensome. I entirely fail to imagine how this sort of winnowing could be automated. Agents to help me organize, tag, and prioritize yes, but without my interaction it strikes me as likely reliable as a computer consistently recognizing pr0n images from others.

The next is the internal intelligence of a system. This has been an area of much research for many years. The current-state information should be almost all available from within the system and with a few supplied metrics (costs, resources, constraints, priorities) "intelligent" decisions should be possible to make. Surprisingly there seems to be little of this actually available on the market already, at least not much available for general server/desktop management (that I've heard of.)

Finally the lack of references to directory services and the role PKI/encryption would play in this future scenario is interesting. Clearly these will be key elements in the ubiquitous seamless environment the authors are talking about yet their mention is notably absent. Is this a reflection of MS's appreciation of these as areas of strategic importance in which is hasn't yet a firm foundation and doesn't wish to draw attention to or is it something that the authors think will be so established by the time they're envisioning explicit reference isn't necessary? Either way it's an interesting omission.

Is this really all that bad?

Come on guys, you've all seen Star Trek. Do you think the Enterprises computer system is much different? You don't see anyone in there with a PC.

These guys were really looking forward to the future. And I don't think the standard MS bashing applies. Not everyone who works in Redmond behaves like MS's business unit.

I'm sure for the most part, the coders are great people. Its the business men upstairs who we should really have beef with.

Seriously folks, can't you see that indicriminate MS hatred is d no different from other forms of bigotry like racism and homophobia? MS does put out some quality products. I'm told their games group is very good (Age of Empires) and their input devices are top notch.

Captain_Frisk... wishing everyone would think before flaming.