Toby DiPasquale on Wed, 9 Apr 2003 19:56:05 -0400


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] Origin Myth


On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 19:10, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> Because Minix was popular among people playing with OSes at the
> time, and because there really wasn't another place to get their
> attention, Torvalds posted about his shiny new OS in Minix's
> newsgroup, merely as a "you might be interested" kind of thing.

Oops. You're right about this. I forgot that lkml didn't exist back
then. ;-) Bad keyboard, no cookie.

> I happen to think that microkernel architectures will *never* be
> worth the effort, that they're a bad case of putting the engineer
> before the user to the vast detriment of the latter.

Until you realize that Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 collectively is the
world's most prevalent microkernel architecture and they indisputably
put the user before everything else. (aside from themselves, that is)

> I also happen to think that the Linux codebase is particularly
> ill-suited to porting to other hardware architectures (though plenty
> of people are working at doing it), and in general very "stuck" in
> what may not have been the best of decisions (decisions other than
> the micro/monolithic thing; that's spot on, in my opinion), but
> didn't matter much when Linux was just an OS for a few hackers to
> play around with.

In this I agree. Also, NetBSD is not a microkernel design but shares
none of the porting issues that Linux has, since it was, in fact,
designed for this from (almost) the beginning. Design plays a big part.
FreeBSD and Linux were designed for performance, OpenBSD for security,
NetBSD for modularity and portability, BeOS for user-friendliness and
Windows for profit-making. They are all very successful in their areas,
but not so much in others.

--
Tobias DiPasquale
http://www.cbcg.net/

_________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group        --       http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug