Re: LINUX is obsolete
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Re: LINUX is obsolete
In article <12595@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>Don`t get me wrong, I am not unhappy with LINUX. It will get all the people
>who want to turn MINIX in BSD UNIX off my back. But in all honesty, I would
>suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" OS look around for a
>microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.
I believe you have some valid points, although I am not sure that a
microkernel is necessarily better. It might make more sense to allow some
combination of the two. As part of the IPC code I'm writting for Linux I am
going to include code that will allow device drivers and file systems to run
as user processes. These will be significantly slower though, and I believe it
would be a mistake to move everything outside the kernel (TCP/IP will be
internal).
Actually my main problem with OS theorists is that they have never tested
there ideas! None of these ideas (with a partial exception for MACH) has ever
seen the light of day. 32 bit home computers have been available for almost a
decade and Linus was the first person to ever write a working OS for them
that can be used without paying AT&T $100,000. A piece of software in hand is
worth ten pieces of vaporware, OS theorists are quick to jump all over an OS
but they are unwilling to ever provide an alternative.
The general consensus that Micro kernels is the way to go means nothing when
a real application has never even run on one.
The release of Linux is allowing me to try some ideas I've been wanting to
experment with for years, but I have never had the opportunity to work with
source code for a functioning OS.
--
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