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Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be (the Register)
The Register
reflects on the history of Linux.
"Linux is what Windows had once promised to be - at least in terms of cross-platform support. In the wake of the PowerPC alliance from IBM, Apple, and Motorola in 1991, Microsoft made a commitment to support Windows NT 3.51 on PowerPC chips. Windows eventually added support for Digital's Alpha NEC's and SGI's MIPS chips. Workstation maker Intergraph ported Windows NT 3.51 to its Clipper chips and said it was creating a port to Sparc chips from Sun. Neither ports saw the light of day."
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not worth your time to read Posted Oct 10, 2008 1:02 UTC (Fri) by jabby (guest, #2648) [Link]
Content-free article... Must be a slow news day.
I disagree - it's just not a very technical article Posted Oct 10, 2008 7:52 UTC (Fri) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926) [Link]
It's not a very technical article, yes.
And I think most regular readers of LWN will find little new in that article. But then, I suspect most readers of LWN can remember installing software from floppies, or probably even starting programs from tape.
But we should remember that El Reg is read by many more people than LWN.
There are people leaving universities that will have been taught C#, that will have had heavy educational discounts on the entire stack of MS development tools, and that may be sold on the integration that their stack appears to provide. People that look down on Linux and its ilk.
Within a decade, those people could be contributing to - or making - management decisions in large companies.
As such, I think that this article is valuable. Its real message when comparing Linux with Microsoft Windows is that Linux is cheaper, and does what it says on the tin.
Not being technical doesn't make it a bad article. If articles like this change the perceptions of people that are entrenched in the culture of Brochureware Fixes, then I think it's worthwhile.
Not to mention the trip down memory lane it gave me. Ahhh, Windows NT on an Alpha. The first, the last, and quite possibly the only responsive Windows box in my life... ;-)
Portability Posted Oct 10, 2008 8:32 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] The Register article makes much of how portable Linux is, but interestingly that was not originally a goal in Linux at all! In the famous Torvalds-Tanenbaum debate (1), Tanenbaum complained how the Linux implementation was closely tied to the x86 and predicted that other CPU architectures will replace it, but Torvalds argued that does not matter at all as long as the kernel sticks to the POSIX standard API, implying that other architectures should use other POSIX-compatible kernels than Linux.The funny thing is that x86 is still alive and well, but Linux nevertheless has got ported to lots of other architectures. I guess this shows that Tanenbaum was right about at least one thing: making a good OS kernel is such a big job that creating entirely separate architecture-specific kernels is wasteful. (1) Copies can be found in many places, one is here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html
Portability Posted Oct 10, 2008 22:30 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Can't remember where it is - I remember Linus saying that you should design your kernel to sit on an "ideal processor". If the processor can't implement that feature, you then put an emulation, or HAL, layer between the kernel and the hardware.
Doing that usually results in a design that is not only simpler to maintain, but actually also usually works better than a design targeted at sub-optimal hardware!
(He didn't word it quite like that, but that's the gist... I think it was in a discussion about the port to Alpha)
Cheers,
Portability Posted Oct 11, 2008 18:47 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well the Linux design for portability is to design the kernel to work on a 'generic' kernel.. that is design it to run with concepts that all processors and platforms generally support, then implement architectural specifics to 'port' the kernel to different platforms.
Portability Posted Oct 13, 2008 23:37 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Linux ended up completely different from what Tanenbaum recommended or Torvalds designed. It turns out you really can't anticipate what future processors will be like (not even x86!). Instead it relies, ultimately, on an army of developers to rewrite major subsystems as needed. Lately that means adapting it to the (what now seem bizarre) needs of thousands of cores.Tanenbaum's approach may ease porting from one CPU (actually, MMU) to another, but it's almost completely useless -- even, Linus might argue, actively harmful -- for what has actually had to be done.
Linux needs a recession to replace Windows Posted Oct 10, 2008 12:57 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
> It will take a tremendous force - perhaps a global recession or depression - to make companies think about learning Linux and investing in the technology rather than go with what feels like the safe choice of using Windows.
Let's hope that the one hitting us now will have at least that positive effect then, because all I see are homeless and perhaps soon jobless people, and having the luck of not being one of them (at least for now) does not make me feel much better about it all.
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