A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Alexander Panek]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:33:18 -0700
"David B. Held" <dheld at codelogicconsulting.com> wrote:

> Alexander Panek wrote:
> > [...]
> > It might look like a "hackish" (yes, I call anything that's not
> > properly designed and implemented - with pedantic attention for each
> > detail - hackish..no offense intended, that just applies to my own
> > code) kernel would has its benefits in the long-term, but I think a
> > proper research to see what features of D can ease the pain of
> > operating system development will gain more knowledge and will
> > hopefully help me invent A Good Thing (tm).
> > [...]
> 
> If you guys really are young college students and can afford to sink 
> time into something like this, I say go for it 100%.  It really
> doesn't matter whether it amounts to anything, because you will learn
> a ton from it and it will be a fun project.  That's just the kind of
> thing to do at your age.  At my age, you have to do things that
> matter (read: pay the bills), which is to say that you simply cannot
> afford to do something like write an OS kernel, and I really envy
> you.  If you're really good, you can make a name for yourself with
> it, even if the kernel is a commercial failure, which is worth plenty
> to your career.
> 
> That being said, I think it would be *particularly* clever of you to
> use your start-from-scratch kernel to explore new ideas in
> multi-processing and massive multithreading, but this would imply
> having decent multi-CPU hardware to play with.  Most of the OS
> support we have is decades old technology hacked together to keep up
> with the hardware, but maybe you have an opportunity to do it right
> from the start.  That is, to create a kernel where multiprocessing is
> as fundamental as memory management or process scheduling.  We try to
> write lock-free algorithms using just one special assembly
> instruction, and look how far we have to bend over backwards to make
> it work.  If an MP-friendly kernel gave us more primitives than CAS,
> because it was designed that way from the start (meaning, the process
> scheduler was hacked up in a new way), I suspect that you could make
> MP a lot easier on users.  Just some stuff to think about...
> 
> Dave

Now those are some ideas and encouragement. Thanks! :)