11–20 of 173 posts
The concept of device drivers being within the kernel is a terrible idea. It should instead offer a stable ABI for drivers to be external and (within reason) be independent of the kernel version.
The concept of device drivers being within the kernel is a terrible idea. It should instead offer a stable ABI for drivers to be external and (within reason) be independent of the kernel version.
This, a thousand times. But apparently it's much more difficult than it seems.
Not Linux, but Systemd[0] makes many people angry. Entire distros have purposefully not included it. Look at Devuan[1] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd [1] https://www.devuan.org/
it led to a whole ecosystem of secondary system to manage apps, god, runit, monit, supervisord, etc.
now i can just write a simple configuration file and have my app managed. i can describe network filesystem mounts as dependencies. blah blah.
systemd made all of this trivial.
If you were starting a project like that today, it'd probably be a capability-based microkernel written in Rust.
The early Linux project was a punk concept of its era. Linus very clearly started out as wanting to make a Unix-like kernel on commodity x86 PCs of the time. It was a personal, workstation hack for motivated tinkerers. Things like server and supercomputer usage were not imagined yet.
I'm not even sure what a moral equivalent project idea might look like today. It was a typical hacker blend of wanting to emulate something that was scarce/expensive using less expensive resources. Today, the smartphone might be the equivalent commodity platform. Both iOS and Android might be equivalent to the MS/DOS+Windows hegemony. But there isn't any equivalent of the balkanized and expensive Unix vendor market for phones, which technical students might aspire to. Linux didn't set out to rewrite the popular commercial OSs of the day from Apple and Microsoft.
The concept of device drivers being within the kernel is a terrible idea. It should instead offer a stable ABI for drivers to be external and (within reason) be independent of the kernel version.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, a thousand times. But apparently it's much more difficult than it seems.
Isn’t this what windows does?
Having your drivers in tree allows the developer changing said API to update everything in tree that depends on said API which they are changing.
The concept of device drivers being within the kernel is a terrible idea. It should instead offer a stable ABI for drivers to be external and (within reason) be independent of the kernel version.
This is exactly why on Windows open source drivers are a rounding error while on Linux open-source drivers are the norm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly why on Windows open source drivers are a rounding error while on Linux open-source drivers are the norm.
A proprietary driver that works is better than an open-source one that doesn’t work or doesn’t even exist.
For a while you could actually use windows USB wifi drivers (Ndiswrapper) under linux, but it turned out to be unnecessary eventually.