[_huayra_]

Mothy Roscoe, the Barrelfish PI, gave a really great talk at ATC 2021 [0]. A lot of OS research is basically "here's a clever way we bypassed Linux to touch hardware directly", but his argument is that the "VAX model" of hardware that Linux still uses has ossified, and CPU manufacturers have to build complexity to support that.

Concretely, there are a lot of things that are getting more "NOC-y" (network-on-chip). I'm not an OS expert, but deal with a lot of forthcoming features from hardware vendors at my current role. Most are abstracted as some sorta PCI device that does a little "mailbox protocol" to get some values (perhaps directly, perhaps read out of memory upon success). Examples are HSMP from AMD and OOBMSM from Intel. In both, the OS doesn't directly configure a setting, but asks some other chunk of code (provided by the CPU vendor) to configure the setting. Mothy's argument is that that is an architectural failure, and we should create OSes that can deal with this NOC-y heterogeneous architecture.

Even if one disagrees with Mothy's premise, this is a banger of a talk, well worth watching and easy to understand.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc21/presentation/fri-key...

[vacuity]

He is right. The point of the operating system is to, well, operate the system. Hardware, firmware, software engineers should work together to make good systems. Political and social barriers are not an excuse for poor products delivered to end users.