🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <nevin-0809950319040001@mac-nevin.cs.arizona.edu>,
Nevin ":-]" Liber <nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU> wrote:
> I'll agree that running bad software on a CMT system can be annoying, and
> in reality we don't always have the luxury of only choosing to run good
> software.

And thus there is no good reason to use CMT, other than the cost of converting
the *operating system* over.

Backwards compatibility with the *applications* is not an issue. The OS can
always provide a compatibility box that pretends to the application that it
has the whole machine to itself.

> This is one of the main reasons that Unix has stuck around for so long. 
> If you were trying to design a good OS from scratch, you certainly
> wouldn't come up with Unix.  The scheduler is bad.

The scheduler isn't inherent in UNIX.

> The UI performance is bad.

X is bad. X is not restricted to UNIX... you can run X clients and servers
on virtually every major O/S out there, and there are faster UNIX window
systems. If X performance was bad enough to be significant people would be
using them.

> The pipe mechanism is very inefficient (2 copies per byte of data,
> minimum)

Sorry, but there have been implementations that used shared memory to
implement pipes. That's one copy per byte, and if you're just passing data
on (say if you're bundling it in a network protocol) that can mean 0 copies.

> and makes it hard to tightly integrate tools (hence we get
> monoliths like trn, Netscape, etc.).  It is hard to keep secure (either a
> person has no system privledges as a regular user or all of them as root;

(or limited privileges as a "daemon" user or as a member of a specialised
group)
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