No one wants their last words to be "Oh my God! The old gypsy woman was right..."
Larry Dignan over at ZDNet has some interesting questions in reference to MS Labs new non-windows OS Singularity
The Singularity effort raises a few interesting questions:
- Could Microsoft start over with a new OS separate from Windows?
- If Microsoft started over with Windows and didn’t have compatibility with older applications what would the corporate revolt look like?
- Will Microsoft ultimately need a clean break from that monolithic Windows code at some point anyway?
- When would you make such a clean break?
Personally I think it is inevitable and necessary and they should make the miserable Vista their last Windows OS. To placate the business community it and XP Pro should not be end-of-lifed for a very long time. It would not surprise me in the least to discover that a lot of the problems with Vista are because of the need to support some legacy code. With so many millions of lines of code going into making up the Windows kernel (it’s rumored Vista has over 50 million and XP over 40 million) there’s no way they are ever going to clean it up entirely in order to fix the holes. It’s time to start fresh. Do it now.
This sounds very interesting
Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools. We are building a research operating system prototype (called Singularity), extending programming languages, and developing new techniques and tools for specifying and verifying program behavior.
Advances in languages, compilers, and tools open the possibility of significantly improving software. For example, Singularity uses type-safe languages and an abstract instruction set to enable what we call Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). SIPs provide the strong isolation guarantees of OS processes (isolated object space, separate GCs, separate runtimes) without the overhead of hardware-enforced protection domains. In the current Singularity prototype SIPs are extremely cheap; they run in ring 0 in the kernel’s address space.
Singularity uses these advances to build more reliable systems and applications. For example, because SIPs are so cheap to create and enforce, Singularity runs each program, device driver, or system extension in its own SIP. SIPs are not allowed to share memory or modify their own code. As a result, we can make strong reliability guarantees about the code running in a SIP. We can verify much broader properties about a SIP at compile or install time than can be done for code running in traditional OS processes. Broader application of static verification is critical to predicting system behavior and providing users with strong guarantees about reliability.
The SDK for Singularity was just released this past Tuesday and you can download it from the codeplex site.
Technorati Tags: Windows, XP Pro, Vista, research operating system prototype, Software Isolated Processes, SIP, Singularity
Singularity?
Isn’t that just another word for Black Hole? 
Ole Phat Stu 
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1:10 pm 3/7/2008