The ravings of yet another Jerno who doesn't know his arse from his elbow,
so likely he has a very clean elbow but a dirty erm anyway lets crack on
shall we.
> Is the OS really going away?
>
Daft question. Even if the OS is tiny there is still an OS, 'the system in
which your applications operate'.
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | The whole open source and Linux movements remain hugely opposed to
> | Microsoft -- while, incidentally, they attempt to match the OS
> | giant's products with software distributions that are even bigger:
> | Red Hat's Fedora Core OS comes on five CDs while Windows XP manages
> | with one, for example. Admittedly, there are many, many more
> | applications on those five CDs...
> |
Wrong. The OS part is actually a comparitively tiny part of the Linux CD set
or DVD. The rest of the CDs/DVD is goodies that you can take or leave as is
your fancy. If for example you go for a Debian net install and take the
basic system (the OS), it takes hardly any time at all to load and install,
you then have an OS. It's the extras and goodies that take the time to come
in (specially if you are as greedy with those as I was when I first did
it).
> | But even Linux folk are not immune to the siren call of the thinner
> | OS -- a call that's been heard many times before over the last 15
> | years. One key argument runs that the growth of virtualisation
> | means that the OS has less to do. With hypervisors metering out
> | hardware resources to virtual machines -- CPU, memory, disk, I/O
> | and so on -- the role of the OS is seriously diminished.
> `----
>
> http://www.techworld.com/features/index.cfm?RSS&FeatureID=3168
If portions of an OS are taken outside, and portions do go outside of the
base OS and always have done, you still have a 'System in which your
applications operate', an OS, it is really only a case that peripherals are
taking on more of their own work.
Take UNIX, the huge memory banks of a main frame, your OS level calls become
calls to a memory controller, so the OS itself can leave much of the donkey
work to the controller, in the end the OS only needs a reference for any
memory allocations and the controller takes care of the rest. simmilarly
with drive banks.
On your own PC at home you may have a particularly good Graphics card that
can basically take care of itself, do it's own internal memory handling,
it's own rendering and layers etc, the OS doesn't need to do much more than
pile data into it. So the graphics side of the OS can narrow itself down a
bit, no need to send a pre-rendered map.
And so it is likely to carry on as various peripherals take care of more of
their own work. Except that we have been in that direction before.
Peripherals were getting more advanced and to do that work on the PCs of
the time was too resource hungry, so the peripherals took on more of their
own work.
Now though, your CPU has raced ahead techy wise and chances are you are
using very little of the available time resources, particularly in Linux.
So they may be less need for intelligent devices. I'm not sure which side
of the fence I would be for that, cheaper peripherals because the OS does
all of the work or a lighter OS because the peripherals do much of the
work. I don't suppose they is a stict one-or-other response to that.
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