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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to move more parts of the operating system into hardware to realize an improvement in speed? So for example say Microsoft announced Windows 10 was the perfect operating system and needed no new features/bug fixes would it make sense and would it be possible to realize the OS software in hardware?

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Your wish is Intel's command:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

Main reason against doing this sort of stuff is it impacts chip performance and esp reduces flexibility. People are always inventing new ways to speed up OS's. So, we implement them in SW that maps to HW with decades of improvements built-in. Works best overall. Everyone doing high-level hardware takes a loss outside some Java and Forth processors.

See http://www.jopdesign.com for another example.

Yes. It's where we've been going already since time immemorial. It's why graphics cards picked up 2d, then 3d acceleration, it's why network cards have varying amounts of power to analyze and manipulate incoming and outgoing packets, etc. A lot of these things tend to be put into hardware after they've been proven useful, usually trickling down from the server world.

Computer hardware used to provide higher level abstractions. An example is the Burroughs B5000. Kind of the opposite of RISC?

In chapter 2 of the tutorial, he mentions Commodore DOS as being an OS which resides in ROM (read only memory), which means it's definitely possible. I'm just a laymen but I'd wager that there are some cases where this is still done.

But that's still just software stored in a ROM chip. I think what he meant was implementing the actual logic in silicon. Something like a hardwired CPU.

I'm not aware of such a machine.

Intel i432 had some of that (capabilities, garbage collection, multitasking, etc) but was crippled by a variety of problems—perhaps most of all that it was quite slow and expensive. It was originally intended to run a Smalltalk-like language, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but got retrofitted to run Ada. Unfortunately the Ada compiler for the i432 was awful, in addition to the slow hardware.

It was a pretty fascinating idea though.

FPGA? ASIC? Sure it's possible, but really only done in highly specialized environments, like bitcoin mining.

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