VMware Predicts Death to Operating Systems

[Raffaele the Amigan]

This is the future scenario:

In the view of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware, today's modern operating system is destined for the dustbin, a scenario unlikely to please Microsoft or any of the Linux vendors.

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...Rosenblum favors a world in which a virtualization layer is tied directly to the microprocessor and other related hardware of a computer. Running on top of this layer would be virtual machines, or mini-operating systems, that would be designed to run specific applications...

Source: OSNews

Added after 5 minutes:

Is it just a rant from a person involved in development of Virtual Machine Environments, so he is just bringing water to his mill, in order to achieve agreements from geek people and raise more money from investors?

Or could it be a possible brand new future with no more OSes existing?

Imagine how poor the scenario will be:

"Mini Operating Systems, just to run few specific applications..."

How bad...

There will be no more OS-Tans to deal with...

[C-Chan]

Well certainly once VMWare, Virtualbox and Parallels (for NON-Macs) can virtualize 3D acceleration and improve performance, then YEAH for sure that could render the traditional OS obsolete.  On the other hand, not only are there still areas in the world that still use 5.5 inch floppies, but we also have tons of hobbyists that still develop apps for the ZX spectrum and Commodore, or try to install an early version of Slackware into a 486 computer.  In other words, there will always be a home for traditional operating systems.  ^_____^

Besides...

Since this could interfere with M$ oh-so-generous per-machine licensing schemes, that makes for a very expensive obstacle to this kind of future right there.... ^.^

[Raffaele the Amigan]

Well C-Chan,

Parallels it is only a solution to run two different OSes on two different cores of the same CPU (each OS running into its own core) running in parallel, performing their tasks in parallel, and the user can switch between the two OSes...

While virtualization implies that you are dealing with more than 1 OS (i.e. 2 or 3 o 4 or more OSes) into a single or multicore CPU, the same as these OSes were were just like simple threads running in a single core CPU.

Parallelization it is the easy way yo implement minimal virtualization, because you split ONLY in 2 the hardware resources of your machine.

Pure virtualization implies more. You can deal with OSes booting and logging out at any moment... You must share the resoureces of the machine between more OSes (memory, bandwidth, peripherals, I/O messaging, sharing TCP-IP, moving and passing data between any OS on the fly... even during calculation of these data) and also your virtualized system must recover stress situation at any time, if it occurs that an OS hangs up, while the others are still running...

So you need a good HYPERVISOR program realizing the true virtualization...

Also this virtualization is good for geeks, who can deal between different OSes, and understand on the fly how they works, but a common user like a secretary, could not deal with Windows and Linux together running on the same machine...  ;014

[NejinOniwa]

Huh? Secretary? Where'dya get that from?

...wait...maybe...!!! o_o

[Dr. Mario]

Don't think so. If there's no OS, how will we ever use computer? AND, BIOS' a small OS - yes, a small OS (which aids in controlling the hardwares and load a bootsector to load either commercial OS or your own homebrew OS)!
VMware is actually wrong about death of OS. OSes are everywhere, even in cheap and sh*tty e-toys (which contains either processors or microcontrollers). If there's no OS, everything grinds to halt, the same result as having no electricity - even Artificial Intelligence requires OS.

[Thrmin]

I agree...

[Kami-Tux]

I think what he predicts is the dawn of exokernel-based OSes. Not the end of OSes as we know them.

[Dr. Mario]

Oh, yeah! I recall that now. Intel's infamous EFI (bypassing circuitry - which doesn't require bootsector, even it doesn't need BIOS...) was made to handle that.