The dream OS

An OS tester fantasizes about building the best, most stable operating system.

By Tom Henderson, Network World, 02/27/06

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My worst nightmare would be to wake up as either Linus Torvalds, heavyweight Linux wrestler of the world; Ray Ozzie, holder of the future of Windows; or Jonathan Schwartz, alter ego of Sun's Scott McNealy. All are the lightning rods in a never-ceasing thunderstorm of new technology advances in hardware and mind-numbingly sophisticated software applications. To live in their respective roles requires ego, panache and vision - and Kevlar armor.

Each of these protagonists had one of his products tested by Network World last year. If we were to take the successful components of each and graft together our own perfect server operating system, the result would be recognizable - but barely.

First, we'd take all of the bloat from every network server operating system. Every superfluous driver would be stripped, and every extraneous piece of code placed onto a spare DVD to be used only if we called for it. Hardware compatibility at installation time mandates having all drivers ever conceived loaded onto the server's storage media. This is like bringing in the 5th Army division when a single sniper is needed.

We'd remove all but the core command sets. All obscure executable items and 99% of such things as fonts, sounds and stock pictures should be loaded only when requested. Ask for the media or, better yet, download it from a secure/authenticated Web site at run-time, when needed. These two actions - deleting drivers and culling obscure executables - would allow most operating systems to be held on a single gigabyte USB flash drive fob. No flexibility would be denied. Bloat would go away.

Moving on from the hardware, we'd give our operating system the rapid porting stability of Linux 2.6. We'd add in Sun's DTrace (a tool that rapidly determines where code is wasting time or is in an error condition), which helps eliminate the finger-pointing when code doesn't execute to expectation.

We'd take the speed of Windows 64-bit editions, late as they were to the 64-bit race, or Solaris 10's seemingly unfettered responsiveness. Both are comparatively ugly, however, so we'd add the luxurious Apple's Panther/OS X.4 GUI.

Related links

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Solaris 10 heads for Linux territory
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