3 ms·
My point is that writing a new operating system that is closely tied to any particular piece of hardware, especially a weird one like the Intel line, is basical
by krat0sprakhar 12y ago
My point is that writing a new operating system that is closely tied to any
particular piece of hardware, especially a weird one like the Intel line,
is basically wrong. An OS itself should be easily portable to new hardware
platforms. When OS/360 was written in assembler for the IBM 360
25 years ago, they probably could be excused. When MS-DOS was written
specifically for the 8088 ten years ago, this was less than brilliant, as
IBM and Microsoft now only too painfully realize. Writing a new OS only for the
386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for this term. But if you do real well
on the final exam, you can still pass the course
Haha :)
- mikevm 12y agoThis just reinforces the fact that you shouldn't just blindly trust what your professors tell you ;-).
- rbanffy 12y agoLinux started x86 only, but it was soon ported to other architectures. I was running it on SPARC just a couple years later.
- jacquesm 12y agoAu contraire, Tanenbaum was 100% right. And porting linux to the first new architectures turned up a ton of hard-to-fix dependencies on x86, fortunately the UNIX system call interfaces were all copied from more mature instances and lived on unaffected.
- joesb 12y agoJust because you can succeed despite ignoring your professor's advice doesn't mean the advice wasn't sound.
- ttflee 12y agoNeXT realized the problems and pains, and hence the portability of XNU kernel.