8 ms·

Linux is Obsolete [1992]

69 points by vinutheraj 18y ago

andr 18y ago
Summary: 1992 usenet message from the creator of Minix, explaining that Linux is no good because it's monolithic and closely tied to x86. In fairness, Linux evolved so that it's no longer x86-specific, and insmod makes it somewhat non-monolithic. Had it not evolved, AST might have been right and Linux might have died, particularly due lack of portability.
- mahmud 18y ago
  Better Summary: AST's rant on Linux. Everybody should know that thread by heart. I figured what it was when I hovered the mouse over the link and saw comp.os.minix in there.
- cperciva 18y ago
  insmod makes it somewhat non-monolithic No. This is a common misconception due to the overloading of the adjective "monolithic". In the context of microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, kernel modules are irrelevant, since they operate within the same (monolithic) address space as the main kernel.
st3fan 18y ago
Yeah. Classic.
nanexcool 18y ago
"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't." - Linus Torvalds, January 1992 17 years later and it still isn't! Makes you wonder about the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem had the GNU guys actually finished Hurd.
- wheels 18y ago
  Probably about the same. I think the biggest thing was splitting away from using a BSD kernel since the BSD projects are typically more, hmm, pedantic? Difficult to break into? Whatever. But the GNU led projects that have dealt with a lot of external contributors like GCC have fared quite well.
  - javert 18y ago
    My sense is that the split from BSD was necessary because of licensing wars over proprietary code going on at the time. It wasn't until after Linux got going pretty well that BSD was established as being free of proprietary code, with some formerly proprietary parts rewritten (hence, FreeBSD).
  - blasdel 18y ago
    No, GNU-led projects have had plenty of drama, GCC especially -- there was a huge forking fracas in the late nineties, and the FSF's politically-motivated crippling is largely the motivation behind LLVM's clang.
- ken 18y ago
  What does "finished" mean, with an operating system? You can install and run HURD today, including X. It doesn't support as much out-of-the-box as Linux does (I've heard about half of Debian), but it's certainly a lot further along than Linux was 10 years ago. Is Linux "finished"? What set of features makes it "finished"?
  - qwe1234666 18y ago
    Linux is "finished" in the sense that it works at least on some computers, in a stable enough way to let you do serious work. There is no computer in the world you could throw at the Hurd and expect your work to not get eaten by a grue. The HURD is an unstable POS and if it wasn't enough they change their mind every few years and switch their choice of microkernel to the fashionable kernel-du-jour. From GNU Mach to L4 to debate about Coyotos to someone who's working on Viengoos. In comparison, NeXT took the Mach microkernel, turned it into a somewhat monolithic architecture and made a commercially available OS, that was bought by Apple and is now on 10% of the consumer computers of the world. OS X is not the perfect academic OS but people are using it to do real work on it. Musicians, photographers and so on are productive with it. I expect that in 2020 people will still talk about the HURD as the Duke Nukem Forever of operating systems.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
cperciva 18y ago
Linux was obsolete 17 years ago and is still obsolete -- unfortunately, most programmers only know how to write in obsolete ways, so it takes a long time before obsolete code stops being written (cf. forking servers vs. event-driven servers). It's starting to look like virtualization will deliver the world of microkernels which Tanenbaum prophecied: Xen is, for all practical purposes, a microkernel with which semiprivileged processes (OS kernels) interoperate.
- khafra 18y ago
  This has thing ring of truth, for me--but do you see virtualization taking the kind of extreme route it'd need to provide more microkernel (at least, like EROS) benefits? A different OS instance for every program? That seems like a pretty kludgy way to do it.
  - cperciva 18y ago
    A different OS instance for every program? That seems like a pretty kludgy way to do it. Kludgy or not, there have been some moves in that direction. People often distribute "VMWare appliances", i.e., a single application packaged up as a VMWare instance; and FreeBSD system administrators often run different services in separate jails.
    - silentbicycle 18y ago
      It also depends on how small the OS is.
      - abstractbill 18y ago
        Something that's too big today will seem trivially small soon of course.
        swannodette 18y ago
        Those giant 800k floppy disk games, those really amazing 160x120 QT movies at 8fps, remember how colossal Myst was, a whole CD-ROM!
dryicerx 18y ago
On a side note, the FTP he mentions still functions, and still contains the directory minix. Pretty amazing that directory structure remained for 17 years. Anyway, reading on... edit: Oh, it's A. Tanenbaum, my OS class used his book...
- mahmud 18y ago
  My OS class used his book, my networking class used his book, my compiler class used his book, my distributed computing class used his book .. and by "class" I mean self-teaching :-P AST is a legend and altered my life for the better. I can safely say that I paid more attention to AST's writings on my 18th year on earth than anything my friends or family have said. I had OSD&I and the Amoeba book on my desk, standalone linux with a bad winmodem, and floppies upon floppies of assembly language tutorials I downloaded at an internet-cafe. Life was good then. Code was good then.
  - jf 18y ago
    Life was good back then. And it keeps getting better! Back then would you have ever DREAMED that IBM would be buying Sun, and that Sun would have open sourced almost all of its cool technology?
anuraggoel 18y ago
Adding [1992] to the title would be much appreciated.
- trickjarrett 18y ago
  And linking to groups.google.com is much different than linking to google.com I think... I was expecting the Google OS announcement (not really, but I still expected something more than a discussion group discussion)
- joe_the_user 18y ago
  I like the surprise factor
silentbicycle 18y ago
For a contemporary rebuttal by Rob Pike, see "Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything" (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum) See also: "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" [2000] (http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....)
jodrellblank 18y ago
Making software free, but only for folks with enough money to buy first class hardware is an interesting concept. Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5. I guess I should take more note when I predict things I think would be technically good ideas...
- mahmud 18y ago
  A "good idea" would be a Lisp OS running on a "commodity" multicore, super-power-efficient RISC processor with a hardware MMU accelerated garbage collection and programmed in SSA-assembly.
  - asciilifeform 18y ago
    Working on it.
simplegeek 18y ago
Couple of years back, I was on the verge of starting a PhD with AST but some strange things happened :( To me, AST is a god.
adi92 18y ago
Wikipedia article about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate
whughes 18y ago
" What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software. (I even wrote my own IBM PC simulator in C, which you can get by FTP from ftp.cs.vu.nl = 192.31.231.42 in dir minix/simulator.) I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long. " Shocking how wrong he ended up being about the x86 line. It makes me wonder what predictions we make today will come out to.
- rcoder 18y ago
  Honestly, this isn't all that far off -- modern Intel and AMD chips have essentially nothing in common with the old 8086 line, and in fact use microcode heavily to "emulate" the classic instruction set. Of course, it took them a few years longer than he thought to get there, but the basic idea is sound.
rbanffy 18y ago
And still we look around and all but one OS we use today are Unix-like operating systems... And the one that's not is a security nightmare sending almost all the spam and running each every botnet in existence. Is _this_ the best we can do?
asciilifeform 18y ago
Yes, though not for the stated reasons: Rob Pike: "We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date." http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189&tid=156&tid=130&tid=11 http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532... And, elsewhere, by others: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en&pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3... "You can say the burden is on us old-timers to tell you what's missing or we shouldn't be whining. But I don't see it that way. I see the burden is on the victors, who have the resources and who claim their way is better, to show us that they won for good reason."
Ennis 18y ago
Wow. I studied University using this guy's OS book. Definitely a visionary and pragmatic.
c00p3r 18y ago
btw, Windows and Java are what actually became obsolete - first because of that's simply enough, second - because there is no such goal as 'runs everywhere' anymore. Linux is just a mainstream, which means it starting to fall.

69 points by vinutheraj 18y ago

andr 18y ago

Summary: 1992 usenet message from the creator of Minix, explaining that Linux is no good because it's monolithic and closely tied to x86. In fairness, Linux evolved so that it's no longer x86-specific, and insmod makes it somewhat non-monolithic. Had it not evolved, AST might have been right and Linux might have died, particularly due lack of portability.

mahmud 18y ago
Better Summary: AST's rant on Linux. Everybody should know that thread by heart. I figured what it was when I hovered the mouse over the link and saw comp.os.minix in there.
cperciva 18y ago
insmod makes it somewhat non-monolithic No. This is a common misconception due to the overloading of the adjective "monolithic". In the context of microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, kernel modules are irrelevant, since they operate within the same (monolithic) address space as the main kernel.

st3fan 18y ago

Yeah. Classic.

nanexcool 18y ago

"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't." - Linus Torvalds, January 1992 17 years later and it still isn't! Makes you wonder about the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem had the GNU guys actually finished Hurd.

wheels 18y ago
Probably about the same. I think the biggest thing was splitting away from using a BSD kernel since the BSD projects are typically more, hmm, pedantic? Difficult to break into? Whatever. But the GNU led projects that have dealt with a lot of external contributors like GCC have fared quite well.
- javert 18y ago
  My sense is that the split from BSD was necessary because of licensing wars over proprietary code going on at the time. It wasn't until after Linux got going pretty well that BSD was established as being free of proprietary code, with some formerly proprietary parts rewritten (hence, FreeBSD).
- blasdel 18y ago
  No, GNU-led projects have had plenty of drama, GCC especially -- there was a huge forking fracas in the late nineties, and the FSF's politically-motivated crippling is largely the motivation behind LLVM's clang.
ken 18y ago
What does "finished" mean, with an operating system? You can install and run HURD today, including X. It doesn't support as much out-of-the-box as Linux does (I've heard about half of Debian), but it's certainly a lot further along than Linux was 10 years ago. Is Linux "finished"? What set of features makes it "finished"?
- qwe1234666 18y ago
  Linux is "finished" in the sense that it works at least on some computers, in a stable enough way to let you do serious work. There is no computer in the world you could throw at the Hurd and expect your work to not get eaten by a grue. The HURD is an unstable POS and if it wasn't enough they change their mind every few years and switch their choice of microkernel to the fashionable kernel-du-jour. From GNU Mach to L4 to debate about Coyotos to someone who's working on Viengoos. In comparison, NeXT took the Mach microkernel, turned it into a somewhat monolithic architecture and made a commercially available OS, that was bought by Apple and is now on 10% of the consumer computers of the world. OS X is not the perfect academic OS but people are using it to do real work on it. Musicians, photographers and so on are productive with it. I expect that in 2020 people will still talk about the HURD as the Duke Nukem Forever of operating systems.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

cperciva 18y ago

Linux was obsolete 17 years ago and is still obsolete -- unfortunately, most programmers only know how to write in obsolete ways, so it takes a long time before obsolete code stops being written (cf. forking servers vs. event-driven servers). It's starting to look like virtualization will deliver the world of microkernels which Tanenbaum prophecied: Xen is, for all practical purposes, a microkernel with which semiprivileged processes (OS kernels) interoperate.

khafra 18y ago
This has thing ring of truth, for me--but do you see virtualization taking the kind of extreme route it'd need to provide more microkernel (at least, like EROS) benefits? A different OS instance for every program? That seems like a pretty kludgy way to do it.
- cperciva 18y ago
  A different OS instance for every program? That seems like a pretty kludgy way to do it. Kludgy or not, there have been some moves in that direction. People often distribute "VMWare appliances", i.e., a single application packaged up as a VMWare instance; and FreeBSD system administrators often run different services in separate jails.
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    It also depends on how small the OS is.
    - abstractbill 18y ago
      Something that's too big today will seem trivially small soon of course.
      - swannodette 18y ago
        Those giant 800k floppy disk games, those really amazing 160x120 QT movies at 8fps, remember how colossal Myst was, a whole CD-ROM!

dryicerx 18y ago

On a side note, the FTP he mentions still functions, and still contains the directory minix. Pretty amazing that directory structure remained for 17 years. Anyway, reading on... edit: Oh, it's A. Tanenbaum, my OS class used his book...

mahmud 18y ago
My OS class used his book, my networking class used his book, my compiler class used his book, my distributed computing class used his book .. and by "class" I mean self-teaching :-P AST is a legend and altered my life for the better. I can safely say that I paid more attention to AST's writings on my 18th year on earth than anything my friends or family have said. I had OSD&I and the Amoeba book on my desk, standalone linux with a bad winmodem, and floppies upon floppies of assembly language tutorials I downloaded at an internet-cafe. Life was good then. Code was good then.
- jf 18y ago
  Life was good back then. And it keeps getting better! Back then would you have ever DREAMED that IBM would be buying Sun, and that Sun would have open sourced almost all of its cool technology?

anuraggoel 18y ago

Adding [1992] to the title would be much appreciated.

trickjarrett 18y ago
And linking to groups.google.com is much different than linking to google.com I think... I was expecting the Google OS announcement (not really, but I still expected something more than a discussion group discussion)
joe_the_user 18y ago
I like the surprise factor

silentbicycle 18y ago

For a contemporary rebuttal by Rob Pike, see "Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything" (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum) See also: "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" [2000] (http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....)

jodrellblank 18y ago

Making software free, but only for folks with enough money to buy first class hardware is an interesting concept. Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5. I guess I should take more note when I predict things I think would be technically good ideas...

mahmud 18y ago
A "good idea" would be a Lisp OS running on a "commodity" multicore, super-power-efficient RISC processor with a hardware MMU accelerated garbage collection and programmed in SSA-assembly.
- asciilifeform 18y ago
  Working on it.

simplegeek 18y ago

Couple of years back, I was on the verge of starting a PhD with AST but some strange things happened :( To me, AST is a god.

adi92 18y ago

Wikipedia article about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate

whughes 18y ago

" What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software. (I even wrote my own IBM PC simulator in C, which you can get by FTP from ftp.cs.vu.nl = 192.31.231.42 in dir minix/simulator.) I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long. " Shocking how wrong he ended up being about the x86 line. It makes me wonder what predictions we make today will come out to.

rcoder 18y ago
Honestly, this isn't all that far off -- modern Intel and AMD chips have essentially nothing in common with the old 8086 line, and in fact use microcode heavily to "emulate" the classic instruction set. Of course, it took them a few years longer than he thought to get there, but the basic idea is sound.

rbanffy 18y ago

And still we look around and all but one OS we use today are Unix-like operating systems... And the one that's not is a security nightmare sending almost all the spam and running each every botnet in existence. Is _this_ the best we can do?

asciilifeform 18y ago

Yes, though not for the stated reasons: Rob Pike: "We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date." http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189&tid=156&tid=130&tid=11 http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532... And, elsewhere, by others: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en&pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3... "You can say the burden is on us old-timers to tell you what's missing or we shouldn't be whining. But I don't see it that way. I see the burden is on the victors, who have the resources and who claim their way is better, to show us that they won for good reason."

Ennis 18y ago

Wow. I studied University using this guy's OS book. Definitely a visionary and pragmatic.

c00p3r 18y ago

btw, Windows and Java are what actually became obsolete - first because of that's simply enough, second - because there is no such goal as 'runs everywhere' anymore. Linux is just a mainstream, which means it starting to fall.