| gabriel rosenkoetter on Wed, 9 Apr 2003 20:18:04 -0400 |
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On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 07:55:43PM -0400, Toby DiPasquale wrote: > 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) If Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is designed with the user in mind, then why do the so many people agree that it's a pain to use, but merely accept that "That's the way it has to be"? Why do they, in fact, transfer that to saying, "Computers are difficult to use"? I was, as it turns out, unaware that Windows was a microkernel architecture (see, I don't really *care* about how Windows works inside :^>). I'd posit that they kind of missed Tanenbaum's point (modularity, expandibility, the ability to extract and replace components easily) if it is. > In this I agree. Also, NetBSD is not a microkernel design but shares > none of the porting issues that Linux has, I was tactfully avoiding pointing that out myself. ;^> > 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. Hrm. Bear in mind that the three BSD Unix-derived OSes you mention bear a lot more resemblence to each other (and to Darwin and Mac OS X) than to anything else. Any "for performance", "for security", or "for portability" changes are fairly cosmetic and have been bolted on top of either 4.4BSD Lite (NetBSD and OpenBSD) or 386BSD (FreeBSD), which were essentially the same thing released in different ways, and whose codebases had quite a lot of interplay at the time. And I would posit that FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin are all far more easily portable than Linux was the last time I looked (perhaps some of that has been cleaned up since I actually looked at Linux kernel code; is there still IA32 assembly lurking?). -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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