Re: [ossig] Re: [myoss] Linus did not create Linux

[sklim <sklim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 20 May 2004 22:38, Ditesh Kumar wrote:
> > incidentally, i just got a "Site Temporarily Disabled" message on
> > accessing www.adti.net, when barely 20 minutes ago i got in.
>
> Tanembaum's writeup on the issue is hilarious. An excerpt from
> 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). Instead of writing a new file system and a new memory
> manager, which would have been easy, he 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."
>
> After all these years, the man is still pushing minix ... :)

I enjoy reading two of  his books about OS design and it still valid.  If I 
could remember that the 2nd edition of his book mentioned about Linux but he 
never critised it.  Today millions users are using the kernel,  perhaps the 
community has rather accepted kernel design.  





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