71–80 of 93 posts
An oft-quoted phrase that applies here is "the enemy of good is 'better'". Clearly RMS wanted his idea of perfection, and almost 30 years on, perfection remains out of reach while "good enough" rules the world on Linux. An important lesson to learn.
Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it? i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?
Microkernels were an immensely popular idea in academia (Mach, Minix, …) when Hurd was begun; I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. Microkernel design is probably a good idea, but the message passing overhead kills actual microkernel implementations. I've heard the Windows NT kernel described as being designed like a microkernel architecture (separate m…
So true. It's unfortunate AT&T/Unix System Laboratories kept the BSD kernel code locked up in a lawsuit. Would have loved the article to have had a deeper insight into that as Stallman had already chosen to abandon Hurd by the time Linux came around.
It wasn't just that Linux was available, it was that BSD wasn't. It's too bad that the last few years have seen a decline in FreeBSD / other BSD OS's especially as it is an amazing operating system still light years ahead of GNU/Linux is many areas. Not to mention that it's one unified OS rather than hundreds of GNU/Linux distros.
One can only imagine what would have happened had the BSD code not been tied up in lawsuits. I bet they would have gone with the mature BSD kernel, leading to a better OS, and Linux would probably be a footnote in history if that.
Interesting how inferior technology wins a lot more than it loses. That said, I still love GNU/Linux. :)
> Linus Torvalds had begun his project to write a UNIX-like kernel for the IBM 386. IBM 386? What in the world is an IBM 386?
As someone who's in his 20s and first got interested in programming as a kid by trying[1] to install Linux on his 386... I don't know how to react to this. On the other hand, it's ridiculous to think of how far things have come since then... people who complain about Linux usability and driver issues in 2012 really don't know what they missed! [1] and failing!
“My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today." So true. It's unfortunate AT&T/Unix System Laboratories kept the BSD kernel code locked up in a lawsuit. Would have loved the article to have had a deeper insight into that as Sta…
I admittedly haven't used any BSD enough to make a well informed opinion but I was under the impression that BSDs are fragmented at the OS level (i.e.: different kernels), while Linux is fragmented at the distribution level (i.e.: default collection of software, file-system layout, etc).
I imagine that, in addition to there being different kernel flavors there are also distribution level differences (e.g.: there are subtle differences between FreeBSD's rc.conf and NetBSD's) so I'm not sure which approach is better or worse, but I tend to lean on the "one kernel, several distributions" camp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. On the contrary, the idea that performance of microkernels is "horrible" is the current received wisdom, believed by the majority of programmers without critical examination, and based on very performance-poor early microkernel designs like Mach. The truth is that modern microkernel designs like L4 can perform IPC…
But why POSIX? There's only so much lipstick any one pig can take.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story mentions this. The industry had a working Linux and jumped on board. It is like how the industry jumped on C++, or x64, javascript, or unicode. The small imperfections in form of these tools didn't, at the time of their inception, justify the more massive immediate workload of trying to completely replace them with no backwards compatibility for something without the blemishes. Competitors weren't mature en…
I recommend the "STEPS Toward Expressive Computing Systems" reports for more current-day thoughts on OS redesign (available here http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php ) Basically, by designing exactly the necessary language for each layer, they've reduced the code requirements to reach useful applications by multiple orders of magnitude. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the results of this project eventually creep…
It sounds great to write vector and font rendering in a few hundred or thousand lines of code. On the other hand, others have been writing orders of magnitude more code in orders of magnitude more time. I cannot believe that has been due to a wrong choice of language or approach. I much more believe it comes from supporting real-world standards and requirements. Loading fonts from various formats, lots of configuration, supporting more and more of Unicode, doing all that optionally with hardware support. That is the tedious part. It is not about how to implement Bresenham's line algorithm most elegantly.
> Linus Torvalds had begun his project to write a UNIX-like kernel for the IBM 386. IBM 386? What in the world is an IBM 386?
As someone who's in his 20s and first got interested in programming as a kid by trying[1] to install Linux on his 386... I don't know how to react to this. On the other hand, it's ridiculous to think of how far things have come since then... people who complain about Linux usability and driver issues in 2012 really don't know what they missed! [1] and failing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microkernels were an immensely popular idea in academia (Mach, Minix, …) when Hurd was begun; I don't think the fundamental problem with them — performance is horrible — had been made obvious yet. Microkernel design is probably a good idea, but the message passing overhead kills actual microkernel implementations. I've heard the Windows NT kernel described as being designed like a microkernel architecture (separate m…
At the time Linus was ranting about micro kernels, QNX, a micro kernel, soundly kicked the Linux kernel's butt in pretty much every way.
Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it? i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?
They emphasised architectural elegance over short term practicality - ie do it right rather than do it quickly. The problem with operating systems is that you need to have a minimum set of working functionality in order for it to be somewhat useful to people not developing the operating system itself. You need a way of storing data, you need a reasonable number of commands to run, you need editors etc. On the hardwar…