Cannot resist myself from sharing this superb post by AST. Talking about minix and linux; Complete post in http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/
"Thus, of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code. He had my book, was running MINIX, and undoubtedly knew the history (since it is in my book). But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up. MINIX is a nice, modular microkernel system, with the memory manager and file system running as user-space processes. This makes the system cleaner and more reliable than a big monolithic kernel and easier to debug and maintain, at a small price in performance, although even on a 4.77 MHz 8088 it booted in maybe 5 seconds (vs. a minute for Windows on hardware 500 times faster). An example of commercially successful microkernel is QNX. Instead of writing a new file system and a new memory manager, which would have been easy, Linus rewrote the whole thing as a big monolithic kernel, complete with inline assembly code :- ( . The first version of Linux was like a time machine. It went back to a system worse than what he already had on his desk. Of course, he was just a kid and didn't know better (although if he had paid better attention in class he should have), but producing a system that was fundamentally different from the base he started with seems pretty good proof that it was a redesign. I don't think he could have copied UNIX because he didn't have access to the UNIX source code, except maybe John Lions' book, which is about an earlier version of UNIX that does not resemble Linux so much." =) AST rocks, as always! :) /* Don't forget to check http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/followup/ too ;) */ /* btw, are we game for a LUG meet this weekend ? */ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylug?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
