It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
A perennial complaint; Rob Pike had a trollier but similar version years back. I'm not nearly as optimistic that we have the resources to cope with the monstrous complexity of hardware now.An anecdote I like to share is that while I was TA'ing CMU's 15-410 operating systems course (a great course - build a preemptive multitasking operating system from scratch) was that the student projects could run on real - if old - hardware. There was a PC that could boot your stuff if you put it on a disk.This PC had to have PS/2 interface to the keyboard, though. A newer PC would be all USB. Apparently, the complexity of the codebase to talk to the USB device was around the similar level of complexity to the entire preemptive multitasking operating system the students were building (and, of course, considerably less educational). I mean, this wasn't a full-functioned OS, but it allowed multitasking and preemption of kernel calls, so seriously non-trivial.Multiply this story by all the devices a reasonable OS would be expected to talk to and it's a scary prospect for the OS researcher... and if you don't have those devices up and running, good luck supporting most workloads anyone cares about.