operating system design

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

The 1969 pitch film in which Saul Bass presents the Bell System logo redesign to AT&T, part of the largest corporate re-identity program in U.S. history.

Bryan Cantrill's QCon SF 2019 talk asking whether operating systems should be rewritten in Rust. He draws on his systems experience to discuss C, memory safety and Rust's fit for system software.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Andrew Tanenbaum's FOSDEM 2010 talk on MINIX 3, a microkernel OS built for high reliability and security. It shows how the system detects and recovers from device driver crashes, and addresses microkernel performance concerns.

Ori Bernstein gives an overview of Plan 9 at a NYC*BUG meeting. He explains what the system is, how it is built, what has happened since Bell Labs, and what its design teaches, with a live demo.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

Joe Duffy's RustConf 2017 closing keynote on his experience at Microsoft building Midori, an operating system written in a Rust-like safe systems language. He covers the technical and cultural challenges of applying those lessons to Windows.

Joran Dirk Greef's Systems Distributed '23 talk on TigerStyle, the engineering methodology behind TigerBeetle. It covers designing safer systems in less time through up-front design, assertions, and deterministic simulation.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

Micah Lee's Circle of HOPE 2018 talk on Qubes OS, which isolates activities in separate virtual machines so one compromise, such as a bad PDF or USB stick, does not expose everything. He gives an overview timed around the Qubes 4.0 release.

A 2014 talk by Geo Carncross (geocar) demonstrating kOS, a minimalist operating system and programming environment built around the k language, with early screenshots.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

A comedy song by onedeadtroll, from the Windows XP and OS X 10.3 era, lamenting that every operating system is bad. It features Wes Borg and Chris Smith.

Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.

Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure. He models a board game as plain data plus small composable functions and compares it with a roughly 22-class OOP version.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

TEDxStanford talk by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, on applying design thinking to your own life and career. He offers five practical tips such as getting curious, talking to people and trying things.

José Valim's ElixirConf US 2023 closing keynote on the foundations of the Elixir type system, covering set-theoretic types and gradual typing with strong arrows.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

A 100-minute tutorial from Phil's Lab on designing an STM32-based 'black pill' PCB in KiCad 6. It covers schematic capture, two-layer layout and routing, USB, and sending the board for manufacture and assembly.

A Kurzgesagt animation of how the immune system responds to a bacterial infection, depicting immune cells as an army defending the body.

Roman Mars gives a funny TED talk on vexillology, laying out five basic principles of good flag design and why many city flags fail them.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.