LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems
Posted Jan 18, 2007 5:46 UTC (Thu) by
elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to:
LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems by drag
Parent article:
LCA: Andrew Tanenbaum on creating reliable systems
"I mean, seriously, who wouldn't want to spend a extra 50 bucks on their computer to make up for the 10% drop in performance if that makes the computer much much more reliable?"
The problem with that sentiment, and the whole article, is that it focuses solely on the kernel.
I don't think I've had more than 3 or 4 Linux failures in my life, and most of those were when using very new drivers (or NVIDIA).
I have had X crash or lock, various GNOME and KDE components crash or lock, various regular applications crash and lock more times than I can possibly count. Definitely into the triple digits, if not quadruple by now.
If you take Tanenbaum's suggestion to heart, the 5-10% "penalty" of the micro-kernel design is irrelevant, because you won't just be swapping in a micro-kernel underneath the bloated, unreliable layers we've built on top of Linux. You'll be building an entire new system, bottom to top, with less bloat and more reliability. Will that total system have a 5-10% penalty over my current system? I doubt it. You can't even *begin* to speculate, because there are just far, far too many variables to really judge that.
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