文档介绍：Systems Software Research is
Irrelevant
Rob Pike
Bell Labs
Lucent Technologies
******@-
Feb 21, 2000
A Polemic 1
This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my
feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much
about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for
me; everyone’s excited about puter industry. I may
therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality.
However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires
action.
Thesis 2
Systems software research has e a sideline to the
excitement in puting industry.
When did you last see an exciting mercial demo?
Ironically, at a time puting is almost the definition
of innovation, research in both software and hardware at
universities and much of industry is ing insular,
ossified, and irrelevant.
There are many reasons, some avoidable, some endemic.
There may be ways to improve the situation, but they will
require munity-wide effort.
Definitions 3
Systems
Software
Research
Is
Irrelevant
A Field in Decline 4
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1
1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999
New Operating Systems at SOSP
"Who needs new operating systems, anyway?" you ask.
Maybe no one, but then that supports my thesis.
"But now there are lots of papers in file systems, performance,
security, web caching, etc.," you say. Yes, but is anyone
outside the research field paying attention?
Systems Research’s Contribution to the Boom 5
A high-end workstation:
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________1990 2000
Hardware
33 MHz Mips R3000 600 MHz Alpha or Pentium III
32 megabytes of RAM 512 megabytes of RAM
_________________________________________________10 Mbps 100 Mbps
Software
Unix Unix
X Windows X Windows
Emacs Emacs
TCP/IP TCP/IP
scape
Language
CC
C++ C++