On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Ben Barrett wrote: > Mark Bigler wrote: > > >... >Again, I'm not sure any system you install from scratch (no > matter who >ships it) ever "just works" all the time (yet). > Not with > all the varying hardware!! It only gets better, when we begin to have > far more types than "pc's" and some macs; I'll stick to a nice > dual-risc core for the workstation: > > So I'll be running funnier kernels in the future!
Maybe not, as Linux, FreeBSD, and other Niche Operating Systems become a bigger part of the market, the economic force on hardware vendors will be to start supporting standard documented interfaces so that they are selling to the broadest market possible. And since there is already a fairly well defined interface that seems to be reasonably universal... Add to which the rapidly falling cost of embedding a processing subsystem in just about everything that sucks volts, and multiple options for connectivity at both short and long-range with wires and without means that most of the peripherals that are closely coupled to the CPU and memory and I/O will in the future have dedicated processors and just talk to whichever processor(s) are requesting display services, or pass along input. The way I see it your keyboard will have enough smarts to always rebind the current context's command mapping to your favorite set of keystrokes, your monitor will have enough smarts to run X and accept connections from any of the devices with access to your display key. Your Printer would be able to catch any number of formats and look up dtd's for formats it didn't understand already. So yes maybe you will be running funny kernels, but many of them will be hardwired into the devices, and we'll have one of those funky stickers on the unphotogenic sides of various appliances that says something like "This Device Contains Code from the Linux 2.4 series kernel further information and source can be obtained at h t t p : / / <insert name of manufacturer>"
