Phantom OS, the 21st Century OS?

jonr writes "Phantom OS doesn't have files. Well, there are no files in the sense that a developer opens a file handle, writes to it, and closes the file handle. From the user's perspective, things still look familiar - a desktop, directories, and file icons. But a file in Phantom is simply an object whose state is persisted. You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect."

[Lord Anubis]

sorry the image is not the Phantom Operating System. Its from an operating system called gOS a cloud base operating system. I was unable to find the Phantom GUI

[JsonHenry]

Holy cow batman! That sounds S=W=E=E=T!!!!!!!!

[ExcelKnight]

I'm sure nobody short of programmers will understand what this even means. Then again, this sort of behavior is slightly similar to that of serializing program configuration and runtime data.

[Lord Anubis]

this is a virtual machine sort of that runs on java. i have to agree that this is an Operating System more suited for our future needs and likely the direction the current operating systems will take.

hit the via for question and answer the original source. I didn't submit it as such because it would have not passed approval. But if you want to find out more you can read here:

http://www.dz.ru/en/solutio...

[Proxy]

So basically a file can be opened by more than one program at the same time? Sounds nice, but what is the need?

In the end, you have 1's and 0's on the HDD, or in memory. You either divide these up into "files" or you just chunk them all together - basically instead of multiple files, you have just one big file. A 1.5 terabyte file, that sounds fun to work with.

It will be some time before we move away from "files" how to interface with them will change however.

[Relin]

It does sound like the one persistent 'file' as we would recognize it would be the memory mirror copied to the hard-drive by the OS. Might sound like a daunting thing to work with, but the developer would never deal with that. It would get read during the boot sequence, but that would simply copy it back into your system's memory for use.

I think the real problem is the memory footprint of this OS, from the sound of it. The OS itself might not be all that big, but if everything is loaded into memory and used as an object instead of a streamed file, resources will get eaten up really quickly, particularly with bigger programs.

Gonna try and keep an ear out on this one.

[Ju]

No files. Imagine you do an mmap of an object. But the objects ctor would handle all read/write data of that object to the file. You would simple instantiate this object (I don't even say "create/new()" it, because you just "use it"), and by say, "updateContents" it does whatever it needs to do. You wouldn't even see data are read or written to disk.

Now go a step further and say, the OS always (!) creates this object for you. It is already created when you instantiate it. You can think of it like the bootstrapper did that for you. They use one (!) memory block, all objects are persistent. When the OS goes down, all objects remain in its state. Memory does not exist as such, it is completely virtualized. That's why they talk about object states, rather then "memory". There is none. If it goes down, all its states are already on the HDD. Basically its a huge virtual bubble containing persistent objects rather then a file system and memory.

Imagine the mem is virtually paged and the HDD is always in sync with the mem. The next time the machine boots, the states are restored, the memory gets filled with what was there before the shutdown.

Because it has no pointers and no real memory, it can use one large piece of address space. Means no memory redundancies per process. Further more, processes don't exist (not needed). All objects can be shared across the system. This is very memory efficient and safe. It should be way more efficient then java. Java - if it would be an OS - could possibly be the closes this could be compared with.

Its an interesting idea. At least in theory. Would be nice to see this in a real world application.

[Theoneneo81]

sounds cool but a total rip off the mac os UI

[Godmars290]

Sounds way too much like the Phantom game console. And who knows what happened to that.

Forget that if it is real it has to get past MS's strangle hold on the industry.

[Boty]

BUT, I'm so use to Linux OSX and Windows. Should be fun for programmers. I will stick with programing for windows(C++), just until I get more info on this OS.