Hi Reuben
Yep. One of the many "finesses" in the STEPS project was to point out that
requiring OSs to have drivers for everything misses what being networked is all
about. In a nicer distributed systems design (such as Popek's LOCUS), one would
get drivers from the devices automatically, and they would not be part of any
OS code count. Apple even did this in the early days of the Mac for its own
devices, but couldn't get enough other vendors to see why this was a really big
idea.
Eventually the OS melts away to almost nothing (as it did at PARC in the 70s).
Then the question starts to become "how much code has to be written to make the
various functional parts that will be semi-automatically integrated to make
'vanilla personal computing' " ?
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Reuben Thomas <r...@sc3d.org>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 9:33 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
>
>On 28 February 2012 16:41, BGB <cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> - 1 order of magnitude is gained by removing feature creep. I agree
>>> feature creep can be important. But I also believe most feature
>>> belong to a long tail, where each is needed by a minority of users.
>>> It does matter, but if the rest of the system is small enough,
>>> adding the few features you need isn't so difficult any more.
>>>
>>
>> this could help some, but isn't likely to result in an order of magnitude.
>
>Example: in Linux 3.0.0, which has many drivers (and Linux is often
>cited as being "mostly drivers"), actually counting the code reveals
>about 55-60% in drivers (depending how you count). So that even with
>only one hardware configuration, you'd save less than 50% of the code
>size, i.e. a factor of 2 at very best.
>
>--
>http://rrt.sc3d.org
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