As evidence that systems research has become irrelevant, Pike points to the fact that SOSP has had markedly fewer papers that have presenting new operating systems, observing that "a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty." While I agree with the sentiment that innovation is the source of excitement (and that such exciting innovation has been woefully lacking from academic systems research), I disagree with the implication that systems innovation is restricted to a new language or OS; a new file system, a new debugger, or a new way of virtualization can be just as exciting. So the good news is that work need not be a new system to be important systems work, but the bad news is that while none of these is as large as a new OS, they're still huge projects -- far more than a graduate student (or even a lab of graduate students) can be expected to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

So if even these problems are too big for academia, what's to become of academic systems research? For starters, if it's to be done by graduate students, it will have to be content with smaller innovation. This doesn't mean that it need be any less innovative -- just that the scope of innovation will be naturally narrower. As an extreme example, take the new nohup -p in Solaris 9. While this is a very small body of work, it is exciting and innovative. And yet, most academics would probably dismiss this work as completely uninteresting -- even though most could probably not describe the mechanism by which it works. Is this a dissertation? Certainly not -- and it's not even clear how such a small body of work could be integrated into a larger thesis. But it's original, novel work, and it solves an important and hard (if small) problem. Note, too, that this work is interesting because of the phenomenon that prohibited a naive implementation: any solution that doesn't address the deadlock inherent in the problem isn't actually an acceptable solution. This is an extreme example, but it should make the point that smaller work can be interesting -- as long as it's innovative, robust and thorough.

But if the problems that academic systems researchers work on are going to become smaller, the researchers must have the right foundation upon which to build their work: small work is necessarily more specific, and work is markedly less relevant if it's based on an obsolete system. And (believe it or not) this actually brings us to one of our primary motivations for open sourcing Solaris: we wish to provide complete access to a best-of-breed system that allows researchers to solve new problems instead of revisiting old ones. Will an open source Solaris single-handedly make systems research relevant? Certainly not -- but it should make for one less excuse...

(2004-07-13 00:24:30.0/2004-07-13 00:13:04.0) Permalink Comments [14]