alt Hacker NewsOur software is littered with the consequences of these kinds of assumptions, and they have an impact on consumer use cases.
x86 still runs in real mode on boot despite dropping the PC BIOS.
Lots of software still assumes a 4kb page size, to the point where migrating Android to 16kb is an ongoing multi-year effort involving far too many people. And this is an OS for phones, which you might assume would lack the memory to benefit from a larger page size.
And one of the most popular consumer CPUs for enthusiasts, the Ryzen X3D chips, broke assumptions in both Linux and Windows schedulers that all cores have access to the same amount of L3 cache.
I would probably not assume the kinds of hardware limitations that we have now will persist into the useful lifetime of current software. Splitting the OS into "consumer" and "enterprise" variants is one of those moves that would bake in a ton of assumptions and make things messier in the future.
It’s all about contracts. It’s fine to define assumptions and build software on top of those. It’s also fine to break those and adjust the software. The trap is trying to steer towards a universal solution (Yagni is the cure there) or trying to slip something in that does not respect the contracts (hence bugs).
UEFI could have supported something like ELF and do away with real mode. Intel and Amd could have just introduced a new line of cpu and everyone could have transitioned to that (with maybe shims to soften the change). But everyone is all about backwards compatibility and compile once, runs for eternity.