Systems Software Research is Irrelevant

• Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000.（大部分创新都来自于微软）
• If you claim that’s not innovation, but copying, I reply that Java is to C++ as Windows is to the Macintosh: an industrial response to an interesting but technically flawed piece of systems software.
• If systems research was relevant, we’d see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the ’70s and ’80s.
• Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.
• Linux（Linux在技术上没有太多创新，它的创新体现在开发模式上）
  • Innovation? New? No, it’s just another copy of the same old stuff.
  • OLD stuff. Compare program development on Linux with Microsoft Visual Studio or one of the IBM Java/web toolkits.
  • Linux’s success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.
  • Besides, Linux’s cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially software engineering) by any measure.

可以看到近10年，硬件发生了很大的变化，而软件则几乎没有什么变化。

• Web caches, web servers, file systems, network packet delays, all that stuff. Performance, peripherals, and applications, but not kernels or even user-level applications.（系统研究都关注上层而不是底层）
• Mostly, though, it’s just a lot of measurement; a misinterpretation and misapplication of the scientific method.（并且过多的经历花在了测量上）
• Too much phenomenology: invention has been replaced by observation. Today we see papers comparing interrupt latency on Linux vs. Windows. They may be interesting, they may even be relevant, but they aren’t research.
• In a misguided attempt to seem scientific, there’s too much measurement: performance minutiae and bad charts. （性能的细枝末节以及糟糕的图表）
• By contrast, a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty. But today that’s done by a cool web site or a higher CPU clock rate or some cute little device that should be a computer but isn’t.
• The art is gone. But art is not science, and that’s part of the point. Systems research cannot be just science; there must be engineering, design, and art.

A lot of things:

• PC（体系结构逐渐趋于一致）
  • Even into the 1980s, much systems work revolved around new architectures (RISC, iAPX/432, Lisp Machines). No more. A major source of interesting problems and, perhaps, interesting solutions is gone.
  • Much systems work also revolved around making stuff work across architectures: portability. But when hardware’s all the same, it’s a non-issue.
  • 系统体系结构出现了很大的变化，系统软件把很多精力放在可移植性上。未来系统架构会逐渐稳定，所以可移植性并不是最重要的工作。
• Microsoft
• Web（web起源于学术，但是迅速商业化，可是商业化的大多内容关注于cache, proxy, server arch这类问题，而不是web对于传播信息途径本身）
  • The web happened in the early 1990s and it surprised the computer science community as much as the commercial one.
  • It then came to dominate much of the discussion, but not to much effect. Business controls it. (The web came from physicists and prospered in industry.)
  • Research has contributed little, despite a huge flow of papers on caches, proxies, server architectures, etc.
• Standards （标准的坏处是抑制了创新，并且大公司有意使标准复杂难以遵循）
  • A huge amount of work, but if you don’t honor the standards you’re marginalized.
  • Estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards.
  • With so much externally imposed structure, there’s little slop left for novelty.
  • Plus, commercial companies that ‘own’ standards, e.g. Microsoft, Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty.
• Orthodoxy（CS强调正统，结果就是variations越来越少，使得imagination越来越难）
  • Today’s graduating PhDs use Unix, X, Emacs, and Tex. That’s their world. It’s often the only computing world they’ve ever used for technical work.
  • Twenty years ago, a student would have been exposed to a wide variety of operating systems, all with good and bad points.
  • New employees in our lab now bring their world with them, or expect it to be there when they arrive. That’s reasonable, but there was a time when joining a new lab was a chance to explore new ways of working.
  • Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination.
  • The situation with languages is a little better. many curricula include exposure to functional languages, etc. but there is also a language orthodoxy: C++ and Java.
• Change of scale（系统规模不断扩大，也驱使着学术研究方向的调整）
  • With so many external constraints, and so many things already done, much of the interesting work requires effort on a large scale. Many person-years are required to write a modern, realistic system. That is beyond the scope of most university departments.
  • Also, the time scale is long: from design to final version can be five years. Again, that’s beyond the scope of most grad students.
  • This means that industry tends to do the big, defining projects operating systems, infrastructure, etc. and small research groups must find smaller things to work on.
  • Three trends result:
    1. Don’t build, measure. (Phenomenology, not new things.)
    2. Don’t go for breadth, go for depth. (Microspecialization, notsystems work.)
    3. Take an existing thing and tweak it.
  • I believe this is the main explanation of the SOSP curve.
• Unix（Unix在某种程度上抑制了创新，大家都在不断地实现Unix变种，包括Linux）
  • New operating systems today tend to be just ways of reimplementing Unix. If they have a novel architecture and some do the first thing to build is the Unix emulation layer.
  • How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable?
  • There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn’t believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding).
  • A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn’t matter, so now there’s only one.
  • Linux is the hot new thing… but it’s just another Unix.
• Linux（Linux在很多技术层面上远不如Windows，而且Windows本身也在不断地改进）
  • The holy trinity: Linux, gcc, and Netscape. Of course, it’s just another orthodoxy.
  • These have become icons not because of what they are, but because of what they are not: Microsoft.
  • But technically, they’re not that hot. And Microsoft has been working hard, and I claim that on many (not all) dimensions, their corresponding products are superior technically. And they continue to improve.
  • Linux may fall into the Macintosh trap: smug isolation leading to (near) obsolescence.
  • Besides, systems research is doing little to advance the trinity
• Startups（创业公司以及风投非常关注短期回报而非长期回报，研究系统研究必须快速出成果）
  • Startups are the dominant competition for academia for ideas, funds, personnel, and students. (Others are Microsoft, big corporations, legions of free hackers, and the IETF.)
  • In response, government-funded and especially corporate research is directed at very fast ‘return on investment’.
  • This distorts the priorities:
    • Research is bent towards what can make big money (IPO) in a year.
    • Horizon is too short for long-term work. (There go infrastructure and the problems of scale.)
    • Funding sources (government, industry) perceive the same pressures, so there is a vicious circle.
  • Stanford now encourages students to go to startups because successful CEOs give money to the campus. The new president of Stanford is a successful computer entrepreneur.
• Grandma
  • Grandma’s on line. This means that the industry is designing systems and services for ordinary people.
  • The focus is on applications and devices, not on infrastructure and architecture, the domain of systems research.
  • The cause is largely marketing, the result a proliferation of incompatible devices. You can’t make money on software, only hardware, so design a niche gimmick, not a Big New Idea.
  • Programmability - once the Big Idea in computing - has fallen by the wayside.
  • Again, systems research loses out.

• Go back to thinking about and building systems. Narrowness is irrelevant; breadth is relevant: it’s the essence of system.
• Work on how systems behave and work, not just how they compare. Concentrate on interfaces and architecture, not just engineering.
• Be courageous. Try different things; experiment. Try to give a cool demo.
• Funding bodies: fund more courageously, particularly long-term projects. Universities, in turn, should explore ways to let students contribute to long-term projects.
• Measure success by ideas, not just papers and money. Make the industry want your work.

There are lots of valid, useful, interesting things to do. I offer a small sample as evidence. If the field is moribund, it’s not from a lack of possibilities.

• Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it’s been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux’s interface isn’t even as good as Windows!)（用户交互设计）
• There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.（如何把众多组件更好地结合起来）
• The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility. （适合描述分布式系统任务的语言）
• The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let’s go back to having the data come to the user instead.（Web的交互方式，消息推送给用户而不是用户去获取）
• System administration remains a deeply difficult problem. Unglamorous, sure, but there’s plenty of room to make a huge, even commercial, contribution.（系统管理）