Who needs a physical machine?

19Jun/072

Who needs a physical machine?

Jeff Atwood spent some time cleaning spyware off of his system.

I think the real questions here is: Why are we still running operating systems that have direct access to the hardware through the HAL?

Why aren’t all operating system run in a hardware VM sandbox with the ability to snapshot the state of the machine at any given point and roll back to any given point?

Why do video games and programs need to “install” at all? Why don’t they all come with tiny virtual machines and have all the dependencies included? Sure the latest and greatest from ID or Valve is running highly-optimized low-level graphic routines, but do all games need that? Wouldn’t the games that do benefit from being on a console or having just enough OS to get the game running rather than dealing with the overhead of the OS?

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http://barrkel.blogspot.com/ Barry Kelly

The OS is still necessary, because PC hardware is so diverse. Sure, it’s less diverse than it used to be, from a game’s perspective, but it’s still pretty diverse.

On the topic of rollbacks, that’s fine if your system has a single axis – time – of progression, but most systems don’t. They have a tree of progression, with some document updates here, program installs there, configuration changes of there. Rolling back something with lots of independent parallel versioning is somewhat less than trivial, I think

It would be interesting if we had some kind of VM, a la the old BIOS, that virtualized what a game expected of the system, making it look a lot like a console. However, it seems like a lot of work for a rather undefined benefit – it seems to me that most games these days are already isolated within their directory tree, and the only bits that ‘poke out’ are the entries in the uninstall list, the start menu, and perhaps an entry in the registry so that future patches know where to look for the game to patch it.

And on the other side, there are OS-like platforms that are trying to monopolize that territory, cf. Steam. Since platforms are inherently monopoly-sensitive due to network effects, I think it’s best that we live with the devils we know now, and not risk too much of the unknown…
http://www.lazycoder.com Scott

“The OS is still necessary, because PC hardware is so diverse. Sure, it’s less diverse than it used to be, from a game’s perspective, but it’s still pretty diverse.”

Yeah, that’s my point. Why are we forcing the applications and games we use to deal with the diversity when the controller most able to deal with it is at the hardware or BIOS level. Technologies like OpenGL and DirectX try to level out the playing field by providing a single API for developers to program against. But that create a whole other branch on the dependency tree. The “cruft” test for a game, or application, with me is: Can I copy the directory the application is installed in to another location on my machine and still be able to run it? Can I copy it to a machine where it hasn’t been installed and run it? If not, then it’s pretty entrenched in that machine.

But the problem isn’t the game install itself, it’s the dependencies.