Unix Recovery Legend (1986)
This brings up an interesting issue in OS design, and that is:<p><i>What are the responsibilities of the OS&#x27;s Kernel if&#x2F;when all files are deleted, and all processes are similarly deleted?</i><p>In other words, the worst-case of all worst-case scenarios.<p>Under that scenario, philosophically, OS-design-wise, what are the responsibilties of the kernel?<p>Well, we might start by designing our future OS with a tiny shell inside of the kernel, for emergency use only.<p>Also, we might consider using a file system that doesn&#x27;t actually delete files when they&#x27;re deleted, but rather flags the disk space as &quot;empty&quot; -- for future recycling.<p>Between these two things, if they were implemented, we&#x27;d get a lot of leverage to resurrect a dead system, but there&#x27;s more to this than that.<p>You see, the above scenario should become an active unit test (tested at each recompilation) of that future OS.<p>Also -- we want to know the fewest number of steps necessary (given the above scenario) to fix everything back to normal.<p>In other words, a very interesting topic for future OS designers to think about!