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One question: Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own. But everybody says that Lin
by lolive 8y ago
One question:
Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own.
But everybody says that Linux really was something interesting as soon as a proper memory management was added to it. And that was done, but not by Linus.
So, which achievement sounds to you the most impressive? Building the first Linux? Or adding that (afaiu, critical) memory management feature?
- taeric 8y agoI don't think there is a total ordering on impressive achievements. Both are impressive in their own ways. So, in large, it depends on what perspective you have in looking at it.
- kyberias 8y agoWhat do you think that "proper memory management" was? Linus himself implemented virtual memory support with paging to disc in Linux version 0.12 (Jan 1992). This made people to switch from Minix to Linux. Maybe you mix it up with some other important feature? X was ported to Linux by Orest Zborowski in 92. Or networking? That was not a one-man show.
- pjc50 8y agoThat story sounds odd to me, as I've never heard it. Looking for history I found https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/962/CS-TR-3929.pdf https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/962/CS-TR-392... which describes the history of memory management as "unclear". I would say it really took off with userland package management - Debian in 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.os.linux.development/Md3Modzg5TU/xty88y5OLaMJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.os.linu... following SLS in 1992. To me it feels that kernel debugging is the hard part; if you're lucky you get a nice clean panic with stacktrace, but if not the machine just locks up. Or overwrites critical parts of its filesystem. Or, in some extreme cases, is bricked and will never boot again.