Yesterday, a netizen sent me a private letter and asked a question: "Will the Laxcus distributed operating system be the ultimate form of operating system development?". Today I feel that it is necessary to talk about this matter, so I took the time to write this article.
Let's talk about the conclusion first: yes or no, we need to analyze the specific situation .
Operating systems have developed to this day and are basically divided into two types: operating systems for personal work, and operating systems for enterprise business. The main representatives of the former are Windows, Macintosh, IOS, Android, and they usually have beautiful graphical interfaces. Representatives of the latter are IBM OS360, Unix, and Linux, which do not require an interactive interface and emphasize high performance. The Laxcus distributed operating system consists of a front-end client computer and a back-end computer cluster. Users manipulate the back-end computer cluster through the front-end graphical desktop. Although it has the attributes of a personal operating system, it obviously belongs more to the latter's attributes of an enterprise business operating system, which is equivalent to a combination of Windows and Linux. The Laxcus distributed operating system emerged in response to the development of the times, and is mainly used to handle ultra-large-scale and high-performance distributed application services. Work such as processing big data, artificial intelligence, and simulating nuclear fusion is its specialty.
Laxcus front-end graphical desktop, similar to Windows
A cluster of computers running the Laxcus backend
At the same time, there is another fundamental difference between Laxcus and the above-mentioned operating systems: it is a multi-machine operating system, that is, a set of operating systems will run on multiple computers in a multi-node manner, and manage these computers in a unified manner. The above-mentioned operating systems, whether they are DOS, Windows, Macintosh, IOS, Andorid for personal work, or Unix and Linux for corporate business, are essentially single operating systems, that is, a set of operating systems run on one computer. , the scope of management is also limited to this computer. This feature of Laxcus is the fundamental reason why it is good at handling large-scale and high-performance computing services.
The emergence of distributed operating systems is strongly related to the current new industries and new application formats. Thirty years ago, we mainly needed personal office work such as WORD, EXCEL, and PPT. Thirty years later, we turned to social-level enterprise business such as big data, artificial intelligence, and virtualization. These new cutting-edge services cover various cutting-edge fields, such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and the Industrial Internet. Their common feature is that they require strong data and computing power support, and they can enable computers to operate in a distributed and collaborative manner. Complete various large-scale and ultra-large-scale high-performance computing tasks in a short period of time. If a stand-alone operating system is used to handle these tasks, although it can also be realized, it will be very complicated and difficult to maintain, and it will take a long time. The distributed operating system integrates various distributed requirements and functions through distributed collaborative testing, shields the underlying operating environment from the bottom, and delivers it to users through programming interfaces and application software in a holistic manner. , it not only reduces the user's application development work, but also reduces the difficulty of operation and maintenance of these large systems and hardware management. This simplifies processing and is one of the main reasons why distributed operating systems like Laxcus are popular in large-scale and high-performance computing.
Let's talk about some characteristics of the distributed operating system:
Horizontal scalability: The distributed operating system can use the computing power of multiple computers to expand horizontally, thereby improving the processing capacity of the overall system. By adding computing nodes, the distributed operating system can achieve system load balancing and fault tolerance without affecting system stability.
Vertical scalability: The distributed operating system can achieve vertical expansion by dynamically increasing computing resources (such as memory, storage, etc.), so as to adapt to the growing demand for data processing.
High reliability: The distributed operating system adopts a multi-copy mechanism to ensure data security and availability. When a computing node fails, other nodes can automatically take over its work to ensure the stable operation of the system.
Flexibility: The distributed operating system can dynamically adjust computing resources according to application requirements, and realize resource allocation and scheduling on demand.
Let's talk about the advantages of the distributed operating system:
Improve system performance: Through the distributed operating system, the computing power of multiple computers can be fully utilized to improve the processing speed and response time of the system.
Reduce system costs: Distributed operating systems can share and reuse hardware resources, reducing system construction and operating costs.
Support large-scale parallel processing: Distributed operating systems can support large-scale parallel computing tasks, providing strong support for big data, high-performance computing and other fields.
Improve data security: The distributed operating system adopts a multi-copy mechanism to ensure data security and reliability. Even if a computing node fails, it will not affect the data security of the entire system.
After talking about the benefits, let's talk about the challenges faced by distributed operating systems
and communication overhead: each computing node in a distributed operating system needs to communicate efficiently to achieve real-time data transmission and collaborative processing. However, the communication overhead can become a performance bottleneck in a distributed operating system.
Data consistency: In a distributed system, how to ensure data consistency and integrity is an important issue. Distributed operating systems need to adopt appropriate synchronization strategies and algorithms to ensure the correctness and consistency of data.
Fault tolerance and recovery: Distributed operating systems need to have strong fault tolerance and recovery capabilities to deal with computing node failures and network communication instability. This requires in-depth research and optimization of the architecture and technology of distributed systems.
Management and monitoring: The distributed operating system needs to provide convenient management tools and monitoring methods, so that users can monitor and manage the running status of the system in real time. This is of great significance to ensure the stable operation of the system and solve problems in time.
The above-mentioned situations and problems appeared in the development process of Laxcus distributed operating system, and were finally resolved, and finally developed into a stable and reliable distributed basic system software. In terms of computer management scale, the Laxcus distributed operating system reaches one million nodes, which is an astonishing physical upper limit. If you want to make further breakthroughs in the future, you can only look forward to the maturity of quantum computers.
In addition to the basic functions, Laxcus also integrates a large number of basic functions at the application level, such as big data, virtualization, distributed storage, and distributed computing, and calls these functions through standardized distributed programming and distributed application software . This provides enterprise users with a one-stop generalized distributed basic platform, laying the foundation for building a powerful distributed application ecosystem.
To sum up, we can make a general judgment that on the road of operating system development, since personal business still has the possibility of continued development, personal operating systems will continue to appear in more forms in order to adapt to various hardware . For example, Apple recently launched the VISION OS operating system for AR devices. As for the operating system for enterprise business, since large storage and large computing power are their common needs, the distributed operating system can fully meet these needs, so Laxcus distributed operating system The multi-computer operating system represented by the system will be the ultimate form of the enterprise-level operating system.