Okay, I’ll bite.

The perspective Timothy presents is a bit of a surprise.  And I half wonder
if it doesn’t go far enough?

Should we really stop at considering the relationship with hardware when we
could consider the software as well.

Thinking about my own domain of distributed containerised computing, from
this perspective, it’s odd to me that Kubernetes, Operators[1], and all of
the Custom Resources[2] we manage with them are run entirely in userspace.
Really, it could be argued that we’re running jobs on a scheduler on top of
the already capable system scheduler just to add a handful of features to
manage the container runtimes that are already being managed by the same
system scheduler.  And you know, if someone really took me to task, as the
speaker might, I think I'd really struggle to justify why this is a
rational design.

And it gets worse.

Because we’re abstracted in this way in the distributed world, not an
accepted part of the “Operating System”, it’s not natural for us to use or
add to the features already shipped with the Linux kernel.  This results in
all sorts of questionable duplication: we run additional services like
Vault when every server already has a TPM, we manage our own volume
topology and encryption(!), we use service like Istio to provide in-transit
encryption and discovery when BPF and the Kernel can already do it better,
and we spend months writing Operators to manage resources that don’t neatly
fit into the Kubernetes ecosystem when FUSE and UIO have been around
forever.  And more.

Which, I think, brings us neatly back to Timothys point; should we be
extending kernels into these domains, and if we do, how could it be done
properly.  I definitely don't have any answers on that topic.  Though I
know it would be entirely technically possible to extend Linux in a way
where the complete Kubernetes ecosystem and capability set could be rolled
into the kernel cleanly.

We'd just have to redefine what we consider the Linux Operating System to
be to do it.

Edward

[1] Redhat has deleted the original post, …ouch
http://web.archive.org/web/20210210032403/https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-operators.html
[2] With some imagination this could be a driver interface right?
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/extend-kubernetes/api-extension/custom-resources/

On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 3:01 PM Russell Coker via luv-main <
luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo
>
> This guy is trying to incite the audience, but he makes some really good
> technical points.
>
> --
> My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
> My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/
>
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