> enough of the iPhone's low-level hardware interface has been reverse > engineered to > get the MilaX up and running
You are a genius! If we could get an extremely miniaturized, stripped down to the bone version of the Solaris kernel on embedded devices (without the features not necessary for embedded devices like zones, crossbow, and RAM memory loving ZFS, of course), it might be useful because it would have these advantages over Linux: (1) Debugging and crash dumps! Linus doesn't like these things, nicht war? I don't think Linux has anything like mdb. So this would make it advantageous for developers to use Solaris instead of Linux on embedded devices. (2) Stable device driver interface, stable kernel interface, and stable application binary interface: more advantages Solaris has over Linux. (3) Dtrace on embedded devices- much better than "SystemTap" on embedded devices, right? (4) Fault management architecture and SMF- no need to hard reboot the Tivo, the cellphone, the refridgerator or the washer and dryer ever again! The ideal solution would be something that is much smaller than Solaris 8 was when it first came out, but still have Dtrace and mdb and maybe even SMF too plus a very basic command line for programming the embedded device (no GUI of course). The only argument against it, is that all my points still don't really show why Solaris is necessarily better than *BSD for embedded devices as the BSDs seem to shrink down to a smaller size and require less CPU horsepower and RAM than Solaris does, and I'm no expert, but I would assume that they don't have the contempt for debuggers that Linus has (dtrace has already been ported to FreeBSD, hasn't it?). The licensing for BSD is more lenient than the licensing for any other opensource UNIX-like operating system as well (BSD) license.... so if *BSD is really equal to or better than Solaris for embedded devices, then there wouldn't be much of a point sinking a lot of money into embedded Solaris. I don't really know whether BSD would be better or not, so I'll leave it to people with knowledge and expertise superior to mine to argue about it. OpenBSD always seemed particularly compelling to me for embedded devices because you don't want to wake up in the morning and find out that some teenager in Romania found a buffer overflow vulnerability in your refridgerator and now you have 4 gallons of sour milk. NetBSD is compelling as well because of its legendary portability. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
