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LINUX is obsolete (1992)

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Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#22

Post by ginko »

amirmc wrote: post #7

I 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 unike…

>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]).

Not only this. Amoeba, Tanenbaum's research OS is a distributed operating system, meaning that many devices could be used as a single system. This would be incredibly useful in our current age where everyone has a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, and lots of other devices that need to be synched.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#23

Post by jacquesm »

The problem with this whole debate is that Linus was 'more wrong' than Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum made plenty of mistakes with Minix which also make it more of a macrokernel than a true microkernel.

A true microkernel does one thing and one thing only: pass messages.

Now that's an ideal and in the real world you don't get to have your ideals realized so rather than to be able to realize this spherical cow you're going to have add in a few more system calls to make it work but you'll end up with something a lot closer to plan9 or QnX and compared to those Linux is very very old hat indeed, it's basically a re-run of the 70's state of the art with a a whole pile of modern day hardware drivers and other goodies thrown in.

Tanenbaums biggest mistake was to try to monetize Minix through Prentice-Hall, if he'd just tossed it out there it would have picked up steam a lot quicker, but likely he too had bills to pay and his expenses at the time were probably a lot larger than Linuses, and so history was made.

So, Linus was obsolete, but so was Minix and the future as we could have had it is still waiting to happen. And when it does you'll finally appreciate just how obsolete Linux was back in 92, and how much more obsolete it is today.

Until then it's like democracy: not perfect but the best we've got (without shelling out lots of license fees for something better).

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#24

Post by jacquesm »

carlosrg wrote: post #9
caster_cp wrote: post #6

Tanenbaum 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.

A microkernel is much easier to implement than a monolithic one. Been there, done that. The hard part is to get the messaging done with zero overhead (no copying), but using paging for the mbufs you can get quite far with that.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#26

Post by sambeau »

Before we get into - "Oh not this again!" and "Duh! but Linux Won!" and "Microkernels are still a better design"...

Remember, today's lucky 10,000...

http://xkcd.com/1053/

Actually, I always enjoy reading this whenever it comes up. I was just about to start a university computing science degree course at this time and was reading Tanenbaum in preparation. This was a debate that was alive for years throughout the computing community I was part of.

In the end reality came down to what always wins in computing (and in life too).

  Running code beats design. Design is always 'better'.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#27

Post by icebraining »

jacquesm wrote: post #23

The problem with this whole debate is that Linus was 'more wrong' than Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum made plenty of mistakes with Minix which also make it more of a macrokernel than a true microkernel. A true microkernel does one thing and one thing only: pass messages. Now that's an ideal and in the real world you don't get to have your ideals realized so rather than to be able to realize this spherical cow you're going t…

If cost was the only problem, why didn't Hurd take off? Did Minix not suffer from the same problems?

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#30

Post by jacquesm »

icebraining wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #23

The problem with this whole debate is that Linus was 'more wrong' than Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum made plenty of mistakes with Minix which also make it more of a macrokernel than a true microkernel. A true microkernel does one thing and one thing only: pass messages. Now that's an ideal and in the real world you don't get to have your ideals realized so rather than to be able to realize this spherical cow you're going t…

If cost was the only problem, why didn't Hurd take off? Did Minix not suffer from the same problems?

Hurd simply never was ready and/or welcoming outsiders that might have pulled it in a direction where the anointed did not want it to go (such as, actually releasing something).

Hurd and Minix both missed critical windows of opportunity and ended up so far behind Linux that they might as well not have bothered. For the longest time the only thing that kept new people flooding into Minix was Tanenbaums courses at VU.

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