zlacker

I remember working on some telecom equipment in the 90ies. It had a x86/Unix feature rich distributed management system. In other words complicated and expected to fail. The solution was a “watch dog” circuit that the main CPU had to poll every 100ms or so. Three misses and the CPU would get hard rebooted by the watch dog.

This reminds me of two things. Good system design needs a hardware-software codesign. Oxide computers has identified this, but it was probably much more common before the 90ies than after. The second thing is that all things can fail so a strategy that only hardens the one component is fundamentally limited, even flawed. If the component must not fail you need redundancy and supervision. Joe Armstrong would be my source of quote if I needed to find one.

Both rust and Linux has some potential for improvement here, but the best answers may lie in their relation to the greater system, rather than within it self. I’m thinking of WASM and hardware codesign respectively.