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There was a brief period of time back in the early 90's where I felt I understood how Linux worked -- the kernel, startup scripts, drivers, processors, boot too
by waynecochran 5y ago
There was a brief period of time back in the early 90's where I felt I understood how Linux worked -- the kernel, startup scripts, drivers, processors, boot tools, etc... I could actually work on all levels of the system to some degree. Those days are long gone. I am far removed from many details of the systems I use today. I used to do a lot of assembly programming on multiple systems. Today I am not sure how most of the systems works in much detail.
- cle 5y agoTo an extent, this is one of the goals, to free up engineers to work on higher level things. Whether it meets that goal in some cases is debatable, and it’s certainly not ideal for us engineers who like to get to the bottom of things.
- someguydave 5y ago“working on higher level things” currently implies that depending on many layers of opaque and unreliable lower level hardware and software abstractions is a good idea. I think it is a mistake.
- cle 5y agoThe best conclusion I can come to is "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". Depends on the context. I've seen cases where it works great and other times where it's a huge hassle.
- 10000truths 5y agoFunny, I feel the exact opposite way. The low level stuff is where all the magic happens, where performance improvements can scale by orders of magnitude rather than linearly with a CTO’s budget. I’d much rather figure out how to condense some over-engineered distributed solution down to one machine with resources to spare.