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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

When Apple supports OSX for consumers, they don't exactly surface the fact that there's BSD semi-hidden in there somewhere.

That's because they own the whole stack, from CPU to GUI and support it as a unit. That's the benefit of having a product where a single owner builds and supports it as a whole.

My impression of Oxide is that that's the level of single source of truth they are bringing to enterprise in-house cloud. So, I strongly doubt the innards would ever become customer-facing (unless the customer specifically wants that, being open source after all).

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Apple is a horrible example, with Apple when you have a problem, you often end up with an unfixable issue that Apple won't even acknowledge. You definitely don't want to taint Oxide's reputation with that association.

As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources. Their computers expensive enough to be very much business critical. You'll get some support by Oxide logging in remotely to customer systems and digging around, but pretty soon the customer will want to do that themselves to monitor/troubleshoot the problems as they happen.

Imagine you're observing a recurring but rare I/O slowdown that seems to trigger under some certain conditions, and tell me a competent sysadmin wouldn't want to log in on all the related boxes (client Helios, >=3 server Helioses for the block store) and look at the logs & stats.

> Apple is a horrible example,

Apple is a great example of the benefits of an integrated system where the hardware and software are designed together. There are tons of benefits to that.

What makes Apple evil (IMO, many people disagree) is how everything is secret and proprietary and welded shut. But that doesn't take away from the benefits of an integrated hardware/software ecosystem.

Oxide is open source so it doesn't suffer from the evil aspect but benefits from the goodness of engineered integration. Or so I hope.

Android is potentially a better example. Compare Android to trying to get Linux working on <some random laptop>. You might get lucky and it works out of the box or you might find yourself in a 15 page "how to fix <finger print reader, ambient light sensor, etc>" wiki where you end up compiling a bunch of stuff with random patches.

Afaik Android phones tend to have a lot more hardware than your average laptop, too (cell modem, gps, multiple cameras, gyro, accelerometer, light sensors, finger print readers)

In practice I don't think it's as good as in theory. I had Apple Macbook Pro with Apple Monitor, and 50% of the time when unplugging the monitor the laptop screen would stay off. Plugging back in to the monitor wouldn't work at that point so all I could do was hold the power button to force it off and reboot. That's with Apple controlling the entire stack - software, hardware, etc.

I think the real benefit is being able to move/deprecate/expand at will. For example, want an app that would require special hardware? You can just add it. Want to drop support for old drivers? Just stop selling them and then drop (deprecate) the software support in the next release.

I fully agree about the evilness, and it baffles me how few people do!

Exactly right, Apple is actually a poor example. Watch enough Louis Rossmann and you'll grasp just how bad some of their shit can be.

> As for why I think Helios will become customer facing: Oxide is a small startup. They have limited resources.

Have you looked at the pedigree of many of the people behind the project? I don't say this because "these guys smart", but because these guys bent over backwards for their customers when they were Sun engineers. Bryan didn't write dtrace for nothing.

> Imagine you're observing a recurring but rare I/O slowdown that seems to trigger under some certain conditions, and tell me a competent sysadmin wouldn't want to log in on all the related boxes (client Helios, >=3 server Helioses for the block store) and look at the logs & stats.

I think you're simultaneously over-estimating and under-estimating the people who will deploy this. There's a lot of companies who would want a "cloud in a box" that would happily plug hardware in and submit a support ticket if they ever find an issue, because their system engineers either don't have the time, desire, or competence (unfortunately common) to do anything more. The ones who are happy to start debugging stuff on their own would have absolutely wonderful tooling at their fingertips (dtrace) and wouldn't have any issue figuring out how to adapt to something other than Linux (hell, I've been running TrueNAS for the better part of a decade and being on a *BSD has never bothered me).

Apple is the survivor of 16 bit home micros integration, PC clones only happened as IBM failed to prevent Compaq's reverse engineering to take over their creation, they even tried to get hold of it afterwards via PS/2 and MCA.

As we see nowadays on tablets and laptops, most OEMs are quite keen in returning back to those days, as otherwise there is hardly any money left on PC components.

Funny how you mentioning BSD got me to thinking of Sony Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Which are proprietary and not user serviceable. A Steam Deck, Fairphone, or Framework laptop is each less proprietary and more FOSS stack, and user serviceable. Which a user may or may not want to do themselves; at the very least they can pay someone and have them manage it.

Also, Apple is just the one who survived. Previously I'd have thought of SGI, DEC, Sun, HP, IBM, Dell some of whom survived some not.

Those three consumer products I mentioned each provide a platform for a user and business space to floroush and thrive. I expect a company doing something similar for cloud computing to want the same. But it will require some magick: momentum, money, trust. That kind of stuff, and loads of it. (With some big names behind it and a lot of FOSS they got me excited, but I don't matter.)

Contrary to urban myths, Nintendo Switch OS is a microkernel OS, not something based on BSD.

IBM mainframe, they survive in specific category

> When Apple supports OSX for consumers, they don't exactly surface the fact that there's BSD semi-hidden in there somewhere.

Or Linux running underneath all the Java-y Android stuff.

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