Microsoft Singularity: An Experimental OS Opens Up

by Sam Dean - Mar. 05, 2008Comments (4)

Many products that come from Microsoft Research don't end up as dedicated, commercial products. Some end up contributing features to commercial products, some go nowhere, and some seem most like novelties. The Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) includes source code, build tools, test suites, design notes and more, and is intended right now for academic, non-commercial use.

Operating systems run into dependability problems when processes crash into each other, and Singularity is designed to eschew such crashes altogether. It relies on what Microsoft researchers are calling SIPs (Software Isolated Processes), which emphasize separate runtimes, isolated object space, and more. According to Microsoft's advisory on Singularity SIPs "enable pieces of a system to fail without risking a total system failure."

Alex Ionescu has speculated that Singularity may be a glimpse of a future version of Windows. I've had a lot of experience with applications from Microsoft Research, and it's most likely that this is more of a platform for operating system idea generation. In any case, it is notable to see Microsoft continuing to develop an operating system from scratch.

Do you think Singularity could influence future versions of Windows?


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4 Comments
 

I think whether Singularity will influence future versions of Windows depends on its mindshare at Microsoft. If it manages to gain sufficient mindshare we will see Singularity-inspired changes in their OS design.


0 Votes

well, the issue, as I see it, is that any large kernel redesign or development from scratch is going to have issues. As Djkistra used to say something to the effect of programming being the way of inserting bugs into code. The good part about Unix(es) is that it has had a long time to settle, and with Linux, it has had the benefit of 1,000s of eyes looking through the code and weeding out bugs.


I'm sure Singularity has lofty goals, but a lot of these problems have been successfully addressed, and a lot of innovation can be built on TOP of this, rather than starting from scratch. That's what Next chose to do in what has become the FreeBSD core of a stable Mac OS X. Microsoft's original OS code was never designed with full user-space memory segregation. So, I hope they are not building on top of that (it doesn't sound like it). On the other hand, starting from scratch has the problem of introducing new bugs that will take decades to weed out.


Please, Microsoft! Innovate, but win by out-innovating, not by blocking.


0 Votes

Singularity is not open source - check the licence


0 Votes

I sure hope so. It's systems need a LOT of this.


0 Votes
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