--- Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The monolithic > design is probably not > going to be best for high scalability and for > distributed computing > environments. > This is one serious issue the developers must contend in the 2.5 development. Microkernels are fine - at least mostly in theoretical computer science - but a very good and free implementation of a microkernel-based OS has yet to exist (I wouldn't bet on the exokernel's commercial existence in the near future).
Should the developers go around this limitation and come up with a Linux microkernel, they'll be able to scale up (all that needs to be done would be the creation of various servers for the tasks needed, similar to the Mach's implementation) or make Linux extremely portable (maybe even devices much, much smaller than the Palm would running be running Linux reasonably someday?) But wait -- this involves an overall rehaul of millions of lines of code! Aside from it, lots of research (what happened to HP's and IBM's commitments to fund Linux research?) and testing would be necessary, making the transition probably the longest compared to the developments of the stable kernel releases from the development ones. > They gave away source > licenses to > universities such as UC Berkeley, but BSD Unix back > then could not be > used by anyone else without buying an expensive > source license from AT&T > because they owned major parts of the code. Before System 7, the AT&T license was more relaxed, as they did gave away source code licenses for research to major universities at that time. When the guys at AT&T realized that Unix is fast becoming a bigtime cash cow due to its popularity, they really closed the source for good starting with System 7, with maintaining the commercial viability of Unix as one of their reasons. This is why universities only taught operating systems design in theory as they dropped teaching the source code of Unix from the curriculum. However, it really gave students a distorted view on how an operating system is supposed to work (Andy Tanenbaum presented these limitations quite well in his book on OS design). UC Berkley was quite fortunate to have at least made some progress in making a version of the commercial Unix by writing their own code; with too much AT&T code still inside BSD Unix they couldn't distribute the OS, only the software produced on it. > Around the time Linus began working on Linux (1991), > Berkeley CSRG > removed the remainder of the code owned by AT&T, and > Bill and Lynne > Jolitz rewrote the excised portions and began to > complete the port to > the 386. Thus the evolution of OpenBSD, NetBSD (and its offshoot FreeBSD) and other BSD type OS's. During the days when the Linux kernel was really young (just before 1.0), even Linus Torvalds said that he expected a free BSD release would overtake Linux should it be released. That simply isn't the case today. I wouldn't say the same about the Mac OSX, as it's gaining popularity and could really threaten Windows on the desktop soon [A port of OSX on Intel hardware may come(?) soon] but doubtful however on the server side, wherein fullblown Unix systems and Linux dominate. As Torvalds would later admit, the Linux kernel itself wasn't the phenomenon that shook the computing world - rather it was the development process that Linus started which made Linux very popular. The speed of development, as well as the openness of development attracted far too many people not only to work on the kernel, but also on application programs and filesystems. It proved that the bazaar could work even in major projects such as creating an OS, and how viable this method can be. Paolo Alexis Falcone UP Manila __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? NEW from Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1 _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
