5 ms·
I thought of a fun exercise: Take the original Linux kernel, study it and slowly build upon it without looking at the current Linux kernel. My thinking is that
by bArray 7y ago
I thought of a fun exercise: Take the original Linux kernel, study it and slowly build upon it without looking at the current Linux kernel.
My thinking is that it could be quite interesting to see how different people evolve the kernel - maybe some interesting ideas result.
- rmrfstar 7y agoThat sounds fun, but a very bad use of time. Linus' monolithic kernel won out over Tanenbaum's microkernel, because it just worked. In the 1990s that was important. Now we want it to work and not get totally pwned because we opened a sketchy email attachment before we had our coffee. Tanenbaum was right [1], but for the wrong reasons, and way too early. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
- Jonnax 7y agoSeems like a waste of time. Like if you want to have a look at a different kernel designed recently: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts
- prashnts 7y agoI wouldn't consider it a waste, the changes and history behind those changes to the design seem interesting to me.
- hakmad 7y agoWhere would one find the original kernel?
- gruntz 7y agohttp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar.gz http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar...
- dx034 7y agoThis repo claims to have the original: https://github.com/zavg/linux-0.01 https://github.com/zavg/linux-0.01
- ville 7y agoThis tarball seems to include the original kernel sources: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar.gz http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar... The release notes for 0.01 are here: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01 http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/R...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y agoI've always wondered what Torvalds's answer would be if you asked him if he had the chance to snap his fingers and have the kernel rewritten from scratch what he would change?
- bregma 7y agoAdd an 'e' to the creat() call?
- jjgreen 7y agoNot much scope for that, it's POSIX (and Ken Thompson's "fault" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8390979/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8390979/)
- beefhash 7y agoWhatever it is, I hope the answer involves “implement kevent(2) instead of creating epoll(2)”.