LINUX is obsolete (1992)
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LINUX is obsolete (1992)
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Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#2Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking.
Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to
While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over.
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#3Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking. Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over.
Also this (later in the thread), he was pretty wrong..
"Making software free, but only for folks with enough money to buy first class hardware (x86) is an interesting concept. Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#4I did some small contributions to GNU Hurd years ago, but still, this made me giggle:
Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#5This is my favorite part:
"Linus Benedict Torvalds In article I wrote: >Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply.
And reply I did, with complete abandon, and no thought for good taste and netiquette. Apologies to ast, and thanks to John Nall for a friendy "that's not how it's done"-letter. I over-reacted, and am now composing a (much less acerbic) personal letter to ast. Hope nobody was turned away from linux due to it being (a) possibly obsolete (I still think that's not the case, although some of the criticisms are valid) and (b) written by a hothead :-)
Linus "my first, and hopefully last flamefest" Torvalds"
This HN comment posted from a Linux machine in 2015. :)
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#6Tanenbaum said that Torvalds would not get a good grade on his course, epic.
"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is
a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not
get a high grade for such a design :-)"
Perfect display of how universities are good at judging people about how well they know how to "play the game" (and usually that involves conforming to whatever frame of mind your professor thinks is right).
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#7I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways.
1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around.
2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unikernels [1] (and where they might be used [2]). Linux isn't going anywhere but these new approaches have value and were being discussed as long ago as 1992. Of course, the author got things wrong but that's par for course. It's more interesting to see ideas that are resurfacing. Incidentally, ARM was a RISC chip and now dominates Intel on mobile devices.
I prefer the second approach. So to anyone poking fun at the author, please consider that maybe this is one aspect of living in the future [3], albeit much further than than most (market timing is always underrated and academics tend to think further ahead than most people). We can also remind ourselves that 'Better' is a tricky and subjective thing to define (cf VHS tapes vs Betamax).
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
[2] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
(disclaimer: I'm involved with both the above projects)
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#8I did some small contributions to GNU Hurd years ago, but still, this made me giggle: Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.
Looking back it's amazing how much traction the gnu userland tools gained and how little (zero?) their kernel gained.
I'm not going to call it a wasted effort, because I appreciate there being other "Unix"-systems around in case Linux ever goes bad, but at this point it seems to be a whole lot of work invested for nothing.
Maybe things will change 5 years down the road when people abandon systemd and DMD had matured, and the best way to run it is on Hurd, but I'm not putting any money on that bet ;)
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#9Tanenbaum said that Torvalds would not get a good grade on his course, epic. "I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)" Perfect display of how universities are good at judging people about how well they know how to "play the game" (and usually that involves conforming to whatev…
Well, a microkernel is harder to implement than a monolithic one and from a theoretical standpoint is a better design, IMO it deserves a higher grade in an operating system design course. Let's not mythify the 1992 Linux kernel, which probably wasn't _that_ good.
Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)
#10Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking. Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over.
The funny thing is that I would mostly agree with him. The important detail is "Among the people who actually design operating systems." Linus would agree that Linux is not designed. It evolved. Very few OSs are designed these days.
The QNX microkernel is quite successful. L4 also seems to do well. The BSD Mach microkernel is still around. Minix is still around, although its reliability approach (similar to Erlang, let processes/drivers fail and restart) does not gain mindshare. Windows is considered a hybrid since NT. Likewise XNU/Darwin is Apple's hybrid.
Maybe the current state is more like: Neither micro nor monolithic won, but we know the tradeoffs now and an OS designer can decide per feature. For most applications the difference does not matter, though. Most applications build on a higher level platform (JVM, iOS, Browser, etc).