What good does this war do? (Re: LINUX is obsolete) Linux Inside
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What good does this war do? (Re: LINUX is obsolete)

 Will you quit flaming each other?
 
 I mean, linux is designed to provide a reasonably high performance environment
 on a hardware platform crippled by years of backwards-compatible kludges. Minix
 is designed as a teaching tool. Neither is that good at doing the other's job,
 and why should they? The fact that Minix runs out of steam quickly (and it
 does) isn't a problem in its chosen mileau. It's sure better than the TOY
 operating system. The fact that Linux isn't transportable beyond the 386/AT
 platform isn't a problem when there are millions of them out there (and quite
 cheap: you can get a 386/SX for well under $1000).
 
 A monolithic kernel is easy enough to build that it's worth doing it if it gets
 a system out the door early. Think of it as a performance hack for programmer
 time. The API is portable. You can replace the kernel with a microkernel
 design (and MINIX isn't the be-all and end-all of microkernel designs either:
 even for low end PCs... look at AmigaOS) without disturbing the applications.
 That's the whole point of a portable API in the first place.
 
 Microkernels are definitely a better design for many tasks. I takes more
 work to make them efficient, so a simpler design that doesn't take advantage
 of the microkernel in any real way is worth doing for pedagogical reasons.
 Think of it as a performance hack for student time. The design is still good
 and when you can get an API to the microkernel interface you can get VERY
 impressive performance (thousands of context switches per second on an 8
 MHz 68000).
 -- 
 -- Peter da Silva,  Ferranti International Controls Corporation
 -- Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012;  +1 713 274 5180
 -- "Have you hugged your wolf today?"