I’ve been silent petty dabbler (read user, not developer) in various operating systems for a few years now.
There are lots of interesting concepts and implementations in various operating systems that I’ve had a chance to play with.
Some of the most interesting ones (my opinion) include the microkernel OSes and Frameworks like Genode, Nova, Fiasco.OC + l4re, seL4 and others.
What I find most interesting about them are their approaches to security, resource partitioning and sharing.
They all employ capability based security done right(TM) (Sorry Capsicum… or rather Unix and kin).
Especially interesting is Genode’s hierarchical organization structure and isolation mechanisms (Jails/containers done right(tm)).
I recommend that anyone interested in operating systems and haven’t come across this one yet take a look at it:
http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index
Besides those novel and lesser known systems, I’ve been following various BSD operating systems.
The two I find most interesting are FreeBSD and its derivative DragonFly BSD.
I’m aware that the latter exists because different people wanted to evolve BSD in different directions.
Many years later we now have both with their own strengths and weaknesses.
The strengths I see in FreeBSD are:
- ZFS integration
- Jails
- Capsicum (and while more interesting, to a lesser extent Cloudlibc as I can’t see it being adopted much unless promoted)
- Architecture(CPU) support
For DragonFly BSD:
- Kernel architecture (Simpler semantics yet comparably powerful and flexible)
- VKernel (Can be made very useful in terms of light weight virtualization offering more flexibility than jails)
- Hammer (Hammer2?)
- More improved GPU support
- http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/
There are lots more advantages to both not mentioned as I’m trying to keep this post brief.
Of course, they both have their weaknesses but I will leave that for a future post.
When I think about these two operating systems, I can’t help but think about what it would be like if these two operating systems were to converge combining the strengths of both while reducing the weaknesses.
I do not have enough knowledge of these two systems to determine the feasibility of this though, I suspect it would be rather tedious(but rewarding) as DragonFly BSD seems to have made many low level architecture changes over the years.
The two systems exist for a reason and I suspect the developers may prefer to keep it that way… and I’m sure someone much smarter than me could show me where I’ved erred by even thinking about this. However, in my mind, I find the thought interesting and believe the convergence of these two operating systems would produce a much improved one.
