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PortabilityPortabilityPosted Oct 11, 2008 18:47 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Portability by Wol Parent article: Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be (the Register)
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.
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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.
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