Vary interesting but I don't think it is relevant to the current discussion.
Linux is unusual among Unix kernels in that its implementation owes absolutely
_nothing_ to the original AT&T licenced code. That is why it is free. Linux was
originally based on Andrew Tanenbaum's freeware OS called Minix (which was also
developed independently of the AT&T code base), but I doubt if there's much of
Minix left in the Linux kernel by now, and it's being tweaked more and more all
the time. I doubt if the archaic performance trade-offs present in traditional
Unix kernels would be found in modern Linux kernels in any recognisable form.
Ralph
Kim C. Callis wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> On 09-Jan-99 Ec|ipse wrote about the following Re: [SuSE Linux] Problems
> with Swap :
> ||
> || Kim C. Callis wrote:
> || >
> || > I have been having a devil of a time with getting any of my swap
> || > space
> || > addressed. Currently I have 128M of RAM and I had created a 128M swap
> || > partition
> ||
> || The only real purpose of swap space is for a system that doesn't
> || have
> || alot of physical memory available. way back when linux was very
> || becoming
> || available, someone had asked Linus if there was a way to do this since
> || he only had about 2mg of mem on his system and couldn't do anything
> || really exciting with it. So along came swap space which made this
> || possible.
>
> I am sure Dennis Ritchie and others would have something to say about the
> above. In reading Andrew Tannenbaum's "The Design of the UNIX Operating
> System", one would find that UNIX was originally optimized to be I/O
> efficient and not CPU or physical RAM efficient. This is because when UNIX
> was created in 1969, it ran on a DEC PDP 11/45. This machine had a 16 bit
> addressing CPU (But kind of a hybrid like the 8088 which handled 16 bnits
> internally, but 8 bits externally, a whopping 40K of RAM and a whole 1M of
> disk space.
>
> So the initial design of UNIX was to make extensive use of swap space (and
> at that time it was truly swap space as opposed to the more efficent
> paging), the original kernel took up 27k and that left 13k to run various
> utilities like a shell and ed.
>
> Thank you for tuning into this weeks episode of "30 Years of Superiority
> - -- The History of the UNIX Operating System, with your host Kim Callis! :?)
>
> - ---
> Kim C. Callis -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> *********************************
> * When it absolutely, *
> * Positively has to be *
> * Destroyed over night! *
> * *
> * (800) MARINES *
> *********************************
>
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> -
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--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ralph Clark, Virgo Solutions Ltd (UK)
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