Nobody looked at the whole stack for quite some time. But it would be time to do so, imho.
The stack is crufted and the necessary complexity is smeared all over it—hold together with a lot of not essential complexity.
Rethinking the whole stack form the ground up (hw layer) through the OS up to distributed networking systems is long overdue in my opinion. But actually nobody designs systems anymore! It's only pilling up yet another layer on top of all the existing cruft.
This hinders also progress in general as it's not possible any more to try out radically new ideas. All "new" ideas are necessary constrained by the existing stuff. You can't "move sidewards" any more to create truly innovative systems.
It would be a good idea to start to look at the whole stack again. And to move things around to decruft it once again.
That's a lot of work of course at the current state of affairs but it would improve a lot of things I guess.
To point out precedence for the suggestion. They're doing the same currently with the std. network stack: The layers we've got are crufted and there been a lot of hacky solutions to cross-cutting issues around. The way forward now is to reimagine the whole stack in hindsight of present-day knowledge about possible design space and current requirements.
I agree with you in part, but the seemingly insurmountable part of that is, again, backwards compatibility. Like, sure there may be a better way to do block devices, but is it better enough to make both the old way and the new way supported in both hardware and software? It has an insane maintainability price to introduce change that is not backwards compatible.
Nobody looked at the whole stack for quite some time. But it would be time to do so, imho.
The stack is crufted and the necessary complexity is smeared all over it—hold together with a lot of not essential complexity.
Rethinking the whole stack form the ground up (hw layer) through the OS up to distributed networking systems is long overdue in my opinion. But actually nobody designs systems anymore! It's only pilling up yet another layer on top of all the existing cruft.
This hinders also progress in general as it's not possible any more to try out radically new ideas. All "new" ideas are necessary constrained by the existing stuff. You can't "move sidewards" any more to create truly innovative systems.
It would be a good idea to start to look at the whole stack again. And to move things around to decruft it once again.
That's a lot of work of course at the current state of affairs but it would improve a lot of things I guess.
To point out precedence for the suggestion. They're doing the same currently with the std. network stack: The layers we've got are crufted and there been a lot of hacky solutions to cross-cutting issues around. The way forward now is to reimagine the whole stack in hindsight of present-day knowledge about possible design space and current requirements.