4 ms·

Well that depends a lot on your definition of bullshit. Linux evolved the way it did for various reasons, but how many are still relevant today? Would you wri

Well that depends a lot on your definition of bullshit. Linux evolved the way it did for various reasons, but how many are still relevant today? Would you write a kernel in C these days? I wouldn't. There are production quality kernels written in at least C++ which benefit from its features, and it's been demonstrated that you can write entire operating systems in managed languages like Java as well. Why should we suffer an endless parade of exploitable memory bugs in kernel space? It's not technical requirements driving that. Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. Not much new software is being GPLd these days, it's all Apache or similar licenses. The policy of trying to maintain every driver in-tree has caused vast amounts of time to be spent on workarounds like installers that compile things client-side, enforcement is poor, lots of time is lost due to needless recompiles, API churn, poor usability of desktop software and so on. Has Linux benefited from correspondingly amazing hardware support? No. Desktop Linux is a morass of bugs that often still can't suspend properly, and in the server realm it's now more often than not talking to virtualised hardware anyway. I could go on. There's a LOT of simplification and "bullshit work" that could be optimised out, even in the realm of a very concrete thing without much room for innovation like an OS kernel - partly because times changed but Linux didn't.

majewsky 8y ago
> Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. [...] I think you're arguing a strawman here. The actual reason why drivers tend to live in-tree is that the kernel-driver API changes all the time, and Linus has consistently argued that being able to do backwards-incompatible changes to the kernel-driver API has been necessary to make the drivers as good as they are.
- repolfx 8y ago
  And yet where is Linux most used? On the server. What hardware do cloud machines have? It's not even public, much of the time. It's all talking to hypervisors. OSv is an example of going back to the drawing board for the majority of Linux's use cases and creating something radically smaller and with radically less 'bullshit' (it runs much faster as a consequence).

majewsky 8y ago

> Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. [...] I think you're arguing a strawman here. The actual reason why drivers tend to live in-tree is that the kernel-driver API changes all the time, and Linus has consistently argued that being able to do backwards-incompatible changes to the kernel-driver API has been necessary to make the drivers as good as they are.

repolfx 8y ago
And yet where is Linux most used? On the server. What hardware do cloud machines have? It's not even public, much of the time. It's all talking to hypervisors. OSv is an example of going back to the drawing board for the majority of Linux's use cases and creating something radically smaller and with radically less 'bullshit' (it runs much faster as a consequence).