Starting Over: A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a new type of computer
It&#x27;s not that new an idea. Keeping everything in persistent memory has been tried quite a few times. LISP went down that road, with Interlisp and Symbolics. Everything is in one persistent LISP image, and you save entire images if desired. Symbolics had some extra hardware support to tag objects in memory and get some level of pointer safety.<p>OS&#x2F;400, and to a lesser extent the B5500 and successor machines, went down that road too. That model was &quot;everything is a relational database.&quot; OS&#x2F;400 had a 20 year run; released in 2008, end of life in 2018.<p>Other ideas that never really caught on include hardware key&#x2F;value stores, or &quot;Smart RAM&quot;. That may come back, since accessing non-volatile RAM through disk drivers is inefficient.<p>The talk seems mostly focused on GUIs, which is a separate issue.<p>If you want to think about a new generation of operating systems, think about what to do in the GPU space. That&#x27;s the future of hardware. Single  CPUs have hit the wall on speed, but there&#x27;s plenty of room for GPUs with more functional units.<p>GPU programs are almost stateless. Very functional. But at some level you need state. How should that interact with a near-stateless GPU? Big unsolved problem.