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Andy Tanenbaum on 'Who Wrote Linux'
Andy Tanenbaum writes "Ken Brown has just released a book on open source code. In it, he claims (1) to have interviewed me, and (2) that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux. I think Brown is batting .500, which is not bad for an amateur (for people other than Americans, Japanese, and Cubans, this is an obscure reference to baseball). Since I am one of the principals in this matter, I thought it might be useful for me to put my 2 eurocents' worth into the hopper. If you were weren't hacking much code in the 1980s, you might learn something." Tanenbaum's description of the interview process with Brown is classic. See also Slashdot's original story and Linus' reply.
Torvalds Vs Tanenbaum. I've never used MINIX, but I believe the source code is out there somewhere, although AFAIK, it's not free software.
I've often wondered what things will be like when Hurd is ready, and we'll have GNU and GNU/Linux, and all those BSDs, and OS X all in usage.
And then we'll probably still have to worry about making stuff look right in IE 6, because Microsoft takes forever to update it.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.1
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28 (and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then was compilers, since I was the chief designer of the the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (see Commun. of the ACM, vol. 26, pp. 654-660, Sept. 1983.). I spent some time there discussing compilers with Steve Johnson, networking with Greg Chesson, writing tools with Lorinda Cherry, and book authoring with Brian Kernighan, among many others. I also became friends with the other "foreigner," there, Bjarne Stroustrup, who would later go on to design and implement C++.
In short, although I had nothing to do with the development of the original UNIX, I knew all the people involved and much of the history quite well. Furthermore, my contact with the UNIX group at Bell Labs was not a secret; I even thanked them all for having me as a summer visitor in the preface to the first editio
Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.1
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28 (and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then was compilers, since I was the chief designer of the the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (see Commun. of the ACM, vol. 26, pp. 654-660, Sept. 1983.). I spent some time there disc
You'd be wary of Tannenbaum's assertion that Linus wrote Linux? Did you read his statements at all, or did you simply comment in a rush to be one of the first posters?
MINIX is licensed under the BSD licence, as mentioned in the article.
...and to make them perform reasonably well, both of these have hacks (server collocation, etc.) that remove the whole reason for microkernels in the first place.
Don't fall for the hype.
On the other hand, QNX is actually pretty true to the concept.
In a kernel there is a lot of interaction between the various parts. In a monolithic kernel these interactions are performed by simple subroutine calls and manipulation of shared data. In a microkernel these interactions require a more complex switch between tasks, and message passing. In exchange, you get better protection of one part from the others, which makes tracking down bugs quicker.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
The whole thread was linked from Groklaw yesterday at this URL.
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
From Micro Kernels
The basic idea of microkernels is to minimize the kernel, and implement as much of it as possible outside the TCB. The kernel should only export simple, low-level operations which hopefully allow for more efficient application implementations. This idea dates back to [Hansen 70], and a good overview can be found in [Liedtke 96]. Traditionally kernels are 'monolithic' in the sense that they implement all their functionality in a relatively unstructured fashion within the TCB. The advantages of microkernels are obvious from a software engineering standpoint:
The TCB is made smaller, reducing the chances of errors due to its faulty implementation. The OS is more modular and thus more flexible and extensible.
Services previously in the TCB can now possibly have more than one different implementation, perhaps even running concurrently.
Microkernels initially met with great enthusiasm and in the late 80s there was much work on them in both academic and commercial settings. This wave of initial enthusiasm subsided when people started encountering what seemed to be inherent difficulties with the flexibility and efficiency of microkernel implementations:
For some frequent operations, e.g. networking, the overhead of context-switching was too great for an out-of-kernel implementation. Thus the microkernels were not as efficient as originally thought.
There are great difficulties with supporting more than one implementation of a basic system service, especially when more than one is to run concurrently. Thus the microkernels were not nearly as flexible as supposed.
These difficulties were overcome by various compromises to the original microkernel ideals. Several efficiency-critical features were brought back into the kernel and the addition of new features into the kernel was supported through downloadable binary code, or trusted 'kernel-loaded modules'.
But this integration of most drivers and servers back into the TCB largely eliminates the benefits of the microkernel approach, in the end resulting in an even more complex monolithic-like OS kernel.
You could include Mexicans and most of the countries in the caribean. I don't think baseball is popular anywhere else in the world.
Here's a mirror of the article while it lasts.
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
It means of his two claims, half (%50) of them are correct. The two claims are that Brown interviewed Tanenbaum (true) and that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux (false).
bbh
AST lists several independently developed systems of equivalent complexity to Mixix 1.0 / System 7. Here are a couple more I found:
OMU (6809 processor, ported to 68000) roughly system 7 but only single user, integrated shell.
http://tallyho.bc.nu/~steve/omu.html
UZI (Z80 processor, ported to 180, 280) roughly system 7: multitasking
http://www.dougbraun.com/uzi.html
Quote:
"Oh everything's stolen nowdays. Why the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached."
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/LinuxOnL4/index.sht ml
Is an example of a Linux personality running on a mikrokernel architecture.
I havent had a look at it, but the developers claim only a performance penalty of 4% to the monolithic makro kernel standard Linux has.
In baseball anything over .300(30%) is considered excellent when it comes to hitting.
So to say you are batting(hitting) five hundred means you were successful half the time.
my first reaction to this attack was, 'who the f### is Ken Brown? as they taught me back in school, 'always consider the source' --if this guy's attacking Linux, he'd better have some solid credentials in the computer industry, right? well, all it took was a Google search, and the first link I hit told me all i need to know: Anti-Open Source lobbyists need love, too Friday October 25, 2002 - [ 03:00 PM GMT ] Topics: Migration - By Robin "Roblimo" Miller - I felt bad for Ken Brown of the Alexis De Toqueville Institution (AdTI) last week... http://www.newsforge.com/business/02/10/25/056218. shtml?tid=19
thanks to Roblimo, we have a first-hand account of Ken Brown's shameless FUD-ing, back in 2002--read this link for a cuttingly funny look at Mr. Browns earlier efforts;>
you gotta love the 'thousands of eyeballs' that are working on our side--it more than offsets what M$ gets from spreading it's dirty money around...
-DWitt
ps. methinks Brown's IP has just gone down the tubes--thank you very much Andy Tanenbaum!
However, L4Linux is Linux running atop an L4 kernel. This means that the Linux kernel is still as monolithic as it always was. The same goes for MkLinux (Linux on Mach) and Darwin (a monolithic BSD server on Mach).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I read the article from the Groklaw link before it showed up on /. Tanenbaum says that at least five different people single handedly wrote a UNIX-like kernel and that Linus clearly wrote Linux. He also says that Brown, the person who interviewed him, was completely clueless and obviously pushing an agenda.
The bitter part comes in the last couple of paragraphs, where he takes the opportunity to say that Linus was a misguided kid who should have paid more attention in class such that he would have seen the obvious superiority of a microkernel over a macrokernel. But he's quick to point out that he and Linus are not enemies.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Windoz had a microkernel in the NT 3.51 days. It is way far from a microkernel today. There are some info about this on the NT 4 resource kit documentation.
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
To summarize, let me call the part that securely multiplexes hardware the "kernel".
- Monolithic makes drivers share address space with the "kernel".
- With Microkernel, "kernel", drivers, filesystems, applications, etc each get their own address spaces.
- Exokernel makes drivers share address space with applications. (Hopefully, filesystems get their own process and address space.)
As you can see, as soon as you start partitioning applications into separate processes for security and robustness, the distinction between Exokernel and Microkernel becomes rather vague. The advantage of the Exokernel or VM approach is that you get the flexibility of keeping things like filesystems in a separate process for security and robustness, and things like video drivers in the same address space for performance. You might even have an X server as a separate process, but still allow full screen mode games that directly call the driver libraries for performance.IBM's VM was never that popular in its raw "Exokernel" mode with drivers in application space. However, it is still hugely popular as a way to run multiple Operating Systems as the "applications". Your mainframe can securely run multiple instances of S/390 Linux and traditional mainframe systems together.
Matt Loney of ZDNet UK is covering the story, including Andy Tanenbaum's two Euro-cents here. I don't think anyone at AdTI, least of all Ken Brown, is going to be living off royalties any time soon - "falls at the starting gate" indeed. ZD even mention AdTI's ties to Microsoft least there be any doubt, which is nice of them. :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It's a Christian holiday, "Hemelvaart". It's 40 days after Easter, the day Jesus supposedly ascended to Heaven on a cloud.
BTW I'm a student at cs.vu.nl and I can tell you the bandwidth is definately not the problem (we're almost directly connected to the Amsterdam-US backbone).
> MINIX is licensed under the BSD licence, as mentioned in the article.
Not until 2000, when Prentice Hall finally came to realize that nobody would pay for Minix with Linux and the BSDs out there.
You appear to misunderstand what a virtual machine is. The BSD kernel in OS X is 100% native code, running 100% in concert with the rest of the system. "Virtual Machine" implies that you are attempting to fool software into believing that it is running on hardware (real or imagined) that it isn't.
Instead, the BSD layer of Mac OS X simply provides a POSIX interface to programs. "Kernel calls" are captured in the BSD kernel server, but are routed to the proper Mach server instead of being routed to the driver or I/O area of a full BSD kernel. Depending on how this is implemented, it could have a very minimal impact on performance. Even if it does slow things down in the processor, programs spend 90% of their time blocking on hardware anyway.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
DOS, Win3.1, 95, 98, Me are all super-monolithic. Your copy of Minesweeper.exe runs in the same space as everything else and essentially becomes part of the kernel.
NT 3.51 was a fairly pure microkernel implementation. However, it had some performance issues, so Microsoft moved a few things like the graphics drivers back into the kernel for later versions of NT, Win2K and WinXP. Modern versions of Windows are thus a kind of hybrid.
What does this quote reference? "Some of you may find it odd that I am defending Linus here. After all, he and I had a fairly public "debate" some years back. My primary concern here is getting trying to get the truth out and not blame everything on some teenage girl from the back hills of West Virginia."
I thought it was a reference to Lindie England.
The teenage girl is a reference to the smiling, cigarette-smoking woman Lynndie England pictured pointing at a humiliated Iraqi man's genitals, and the fact that she and her smiling comrades will take the fall for Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the chain of command.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
One reason that Minix did not "rise to the challenge" is that Tannenbaum wanted to keep his OS simple, for didactic reasons. Linux designed his OS to run on his new 386 computer, which had all sorts of nifty capabilities-- memory protection, a 32 bit address space, etc. Tannenbaum thought it was important to run run on on low end (student) hardware
Crap, if Apple has taken measures to improve the Darwin kernel performance, then I would submit that they have failed miserably.
Since we're talking kernels here, I don't feel bad bringing out lmbench numbers. here and hereare lmbench runs on the same hardware comparing linux to Darwin. The Linux kernel kicks the crap out of the Darwin kernel, in most cases by an order of magnitude.
To be fair though, he primarily wrote Minix for educational purposes, with the idea that a computer science student could read and understand the entire system within the duration of a one-semester course. He refused to add a lot of features which would have made Minix harder to understand, even though they would have made it more useful.
both.
I had an experience where an entire development team of twenty people spent about a year and a half writing a large, grandiose enterprise software system that was supposed to be general-purpose and flexible, but in the end was a real performance turd at the job it was supposed to do. Using what I knew about the actual problem from looking at the previous solution's mistakes and the original problem statement, I rewrote the system from scratch over about 8 weeks at a client's site, averaging about 300 SLOCs a day (coding in Java where I can fly), with one developer helping me on a few specific tasks, and we ended up with a system that was functionally equivalent and about 50 times faster than the previous version because it stripped out all the unnecessary modularity (modularity is good, but if you split something that should be one component into ten, you just get lots of extra overhead) and message-passing that gunked up the original design.
I can't help but think of the analogy between this project and the Linux/MINIX effort. My knowledge of the problem was informed by analyzing the earlier design, but not a line of code was actually derived from it. And the twenty-some-odd man year effort was replaced neatly by a 3-man-month effort that was superior.
The moral of the story is that any of us who've been around in the software world long enough will tell you that most any system, assuming you lift all the crazy featurization constraints, can be written fairly rapidly by one person. And that usually you'll get a better result with an early working product and iterative functionality development than you will with a monolithic development effort, assuming you know the architectural parameters going into the effort by having been able to analyze previous efforts at solving a similar problem.
So the point is... keep the assumptions in mind before you start estimating a project's size and scope, man-hour requirements and so on. Development of UNIX-like OSes was a well-defined, well-understood problem at the time Linus did his work. And don't go claiming that somebody accomplished an impossible task unless you have a REALLY good understanding of the software engineering process in general, and the particulars of the problem they solved - in this case Ken Brown has neither. We didn't really need Mr. Tanenbaum to tell us that, but it shows what a stand-up guy he is that he has made a clear effort to defend Linus despite any past arguments they may have had.
No. No he didn't.
s ic.htm
Read more history.
More importantly, he didn't "invent" basic, he stole it from http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blba
Dartmouth.
That's a more interesting question is it not? That Bill Gates and Paul Allen stole Basic from Dartmouth?
Background
The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information.
Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, contacted me in early March. He said he was writing a book on the history of UNIX and would like to interview me. Since I have written 15 books and have been involved in the history of UNIX in several ways, I said I was willing to help out. I have been interviewed by many people for many reasons over the years, and have been on Dutch and US TV and radio and in various newspapers and magazines, so I didn't think too much about it.
Brown flew over to Amsterdam to interview me on 23 March 2004. Apparently I was the only reason for his coming to Europe. The interview got off to a shaky start, roughly paraphrased as follows:
AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
He was extremely evasive about why he was there and who was funding him. He just kept saying he was just writing a book about the history of UNIX. I asked him what he thought of Peter Salus' book, A Quarter Century of UNIX. He'd never heard of it! I mean, if you are writing a book on the history of UNIX and flying 3000 miles to interview some guy about the subject, wouldn't it make sense to at least go to amazon.com and type "history unix" in the search box, in which case Salus' book is the first hit? For $28 (and free shipping if you play your cards right) you could learn an awful lot about the material and not get any jet lag. As I sooned learned, Brown is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was already suspicious. As a long-time author, I know it makes sense to at least be aware of what the competition is. He didn't bother.
UNIX and Me
I didn't think it odd that Brown would want to interview me about the history of UNIX. There are worse people to ask. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent several summers in the UNIX group (Dept. 1127) at Bell Labs. I knew Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and the rest of the people involved in the development of UNIX. I have stayed at Rob Pike's house and Al Aho's house for extended periods of time. Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, and Peter Weinberger, among others have stayed at my house in Amsterdam. Three of my Ph.D. students have worked in the UNIX group at Bell Labs and one of them is a permanent staff member now.
Oddly enough, when I was at Bell Labs, my interest was not operating systems, although I had written one and published a paper about it (see "Software - Practice & Experience," vol. 2, pp. 109-119, 1973). My interest then was compilers, since I was the chief designer of the the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (see Commun. of the ACM, vol. 26, pp. 654-660, Sept. 1983.). I spent some time there discussing compilers with Steve Johnson, networking with Greg Chesson, writing tools with Lorinda Cherry, and book authoring with Brian Kernighan, among many others. I also became friends with the other "foreigner," there, Bjarne Stroustrup, who would later go on to design and implement C++.
In short, although I had nothing to do with the development of the original UNIX, I knew all the people involved and much of the history quite well. Furthermore, my contact with the UNIX group at Bell Labs was not a secret; I even thanked them all for having me as a summer visitor in the preface to the first edition of my book Computer Networks. Amazingly, Brown knew not
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Interesting...! I think I'll email PJ with this little lot!
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
In fact, back at university I implemented the "nice" command for MINIX 2.0. The hard part was to pass the message from userland to the scheduler (which previosly I had modified so it sorts the process qeue according to the priority).
I haven't try anything similar for Linux, but having a monolitic architecture surely simplifies the message passing burden (which was a lot!), although it migth add other problems I haven't consider...
For a start, the simplest OS seems to be a monolitic approach, single-task, single-user, like DOS... taking to the extreme the KISS approach we would go back to pure assembly language...
Mirror #1
Mirror #2
BeOS did not have a microkernel, although it did borrow some ideas from microkernel design. Filesystems, drivers, etc. were loaded into the kernel at boot time, they weren't separate processes.
- chrish
If you do a Google search for MINUX, it says:
Did you mean: LINUX I am sure that makes Tanenbaum happy.
Dumbass. Next time try typing in the correct name, MINIX not minux.
but Linux rose to the challenge, Minix pretty much didn't.
RTA. particularly the bit where Tanenbaum says that he kept MINIX small in order to to keep it up the challenge of being a good teaching tool. And then goes on to imply that he was suprised that it took so long for the niche of free, open production-featured UNIX to be filled by Linux and BSD.
Of course, Tanenbaum would have prefered that niche to be filled by a microkernel OS, but MINIX was never going to be that OS. MINIX was going to be the code that the creators of free UNIX cut thier teeth on at university. And guess what, it was.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
It is a shame that such a bunch of liers, obviously finnanced by the Microsoft Marketing Department, is allowed to use Tocqueville's name. The man must be almost rising from his grave to do them justice.
Anyway, a quote of his seems to apply:"In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils it creates..."
All is pretty clear: the Alexis de Tocqueville Foundation is nothing more than a front-end to third-party interests, the Foundation agenda is clearly determined by the ammount of money payed by its clients and the Foundantion and its members are willing to say and do anything, no matter how dishonnest, to please their clients.
It is now just a matter using every opportunity to show the evidence to the press so the harm they can do is minimized. Until Microsoft chooses another "Foundation" to fund...
He is telling that Linux was 2x faster on *that very hardware*.
Who's the bunch of crap now?
Ha. A search for the author of this posting reveals a rather lengthy list of "OS Research Questions" in forums, newsgroups and alike. Implementation details, amount of work, authors and ownership, etc.
But shouldn't come as a surprise, as his email address "[name]@adti.net" belongs to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution mentioned in the article.
NT 4.0 moved away from microkernel by putting window management and graphics subsystem into the kernel. It was because of performance measurements done at the time on the hardware that existed at the time. Unfortunately these measurements were a snapshot in time - hardware became much more powerful and over time proved moving the gui subsystem into the kernel was shortsighted and unnecessary.
Minix ran on 8086 computers. 20 bit memory. No memory protection.
I still remember reading in Byte about the first 486 machine-- a rather expensive, bulky system, too exotic for personal use. After a few months, more economical systems were gradually introduced. It was a far cry from today's market, where the usual response to a new x86 incarnation is to benchmark it against "Serious Sam" and "Quake 3".
In case you have any questions about his book, Ken Brown can be found here or here. (Source.)
The performance hit of doing a context switch on PowerPC is about the same as doing a function call, which make multithreading and things like microkernels very easy to do fast. On x86, the overhead is often an order of magnitude larger, making microkernels crawl.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What do we know about Justin Orndorff
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1. On April 12, 2004, he asked about Linux ownership on usenet linux.kernel, using IP address 66.44.2.45 (RCN dialup access range). He used raison__d_etre@hotmail.com as his originating email address.
References
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1Kbes-3hM
2. On April 28, 2004, he asked about obtaining older versions of Minix in a Minix related mailing-list. He used raison__d_etre@HOTMAIL.COM as his originating email address.
References
http://listserv.nodak.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=in
3. On May 6, 2004, he posted questions about O.S. development on usenet alt.os.development, using IP address 66.44.4.15 (again, RCN dialup access range). He used jorndorff@adti.net as his originating email address.
References
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=b6920e1.0
4. Later on May 6, 2004, the very same questions were asked in various web forums by someone using the nickname "jnana".
References
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/1067.htm
http://forums.devhardware.com/showthread.php?t=1
http://www.osdev.org/board.js
5. On may 18th, 2004, he asked questions about corporate contribution into Linux on usenet linux.samba, using IP address 138.88.144.59 (Verizon DSL access range). He used raison__d_etre@hotmail.com as his originating email address.
References
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1Xf0Z-7VF
It is very likely that it is indeed only one person as
- The topics are closely related.
- The IP used when posting using the @adti.net address (3) is on the same range as the one used when posting using the @hotmail.com address (1).
- The questions asked using the jnana nickname (4) are the same as the ones asked using the @adti.net address (3).
Obviously, we have someone here, going by the names of Justin Orndorff/Jnana/Raison__d_etre (French for "reason to exist, or reason to be), and who seems very interested in Linux and other FOSS intelectual properties issues.
This person has at least two email addresses
raison__d_etre@hotmail.com
jorndorff@adti.net
What else ?
6. He apparently has a page/blog on Devianart. He uses the same Justin O. and Jnana names. He says he's 22 and lives in CP (?), Maryland. He has apparently started a new job on March 1st.
References
http://jnana.deviantart.com/
http://jnana.dev
7. He seems to like movies, particularly the "poetic" genre.
References
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member
8. He likes VHS music tapes trading (particularly black metal), has an email address @wam.umd.edu (University of Maryland) where he seems to be a student.
References
http://www.tapetradernetwork.com/Framed_body_r
http://www.tapetradernetwork.
9. A while back he was looking for "Codreanu comp. ['Fidelis Legio']" (whatever that is, apparently more black metal).
References
http://grumblesmurf.net/pipermail/coldmeat-l/2
10. Well, he actually seems to be an English student at U. of Maryland (College Park, CP again, see (6)), and interested in films production.
References
http://cinemaminima.com/blogs/orndorff/
OK, so maybe this is going a little fast but we apparently have an
- English student in Maryland,
- Interested in films
- Using email addresses raison__d_etre@hotmail.com, jorndorff@adti.net and maybe morpheus@wam.umd.edu (fake ?)
- Working since March or April for the ADTI (A. de Tocqueville Institute)
Actually its RMS who calls Linus 'just an engineer' and its not a compliment. Its said in the vein of 'just a child,' as in he might be able to do something but he doesn't understand the ramifications. In this case, Linus isn't fighting his (RMS) holy war so he doesn't think highly of Linus and derides him as just an engineer who doesn't understand the whys of the GPL.
A closer quote from Revolution OS is "he calls me just an engineer."
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Well they tried this crap two years ago at the behest of Microsoft. The article was so bad that it was pulled after just one day. Look here for a copy, captured before it was pulled..
Help fight continental drift.
The software that Apple is referring to with the term "BSD subsystem", and the BSD core I/O routines to which the grandparent is referring, are not the same thing. I don't know for sure, but I believe Apple's talking about some additional libraries and such that folks developing for BSD are used to having installed, but which aren't needed by OS X and typical Apple-centric apps.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Um. NT4's still got the same kernel architecture that NT3 had.
The only difference is that in NT 4, the GDI and USER components were moved from user mode (in CSRSS.EXE) to kernel mode (as the Win32K.Sys device driver).
Having the GUI running at ring 0 is not the same thing as having a monolithic kernel.
but it a'int a microkernel either, eh? (think QNX).
cheers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
Exactly. The parent probably meant disk device driver. I wonder what blocksize he used? Picking the right blocksize makes all the difference in the world; larger blocksizes reduce head movements (which are orders of magnitude slower than actual data transfers), but will eventually exhaust core memory.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
" Microsoft indeed has provided funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution for five years, a Microsoft representative said, without disclosing how much has been granted. Microsoft funds several public policy institutes, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, the representative said. "
CNet
Um, but it is compiling for different instruction sets, which is a different task.
Perhaps if you were cross-compiling for intel on the mac the number comparison would mean something.
but who says gcc is equally efficient on both PPC and x86?
It might be for all I know, but it's certainly more likely that it's gcc being a troll rather that the actual mach kernel being slow...
See Here for the white paper explaining the move to place GDI and USER in kernel space.
The example they give is that the 3D pinball game runs great on Windows95 but terrible on NT 3.5 on the same hardware. Putting GDI in kernel mode was important to bring NT up to equivelent performance. Personally I think they found they couldn't get Win95s more complicated shell to run fast enough on NT, and they wanted to have the same environment on both Consumer and Business OS after all the Marketing that Windows 95 got.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
After seeing all the responses yesterday, I think I have a better idea of Ken Brown's motivation in coming to see me and also his motivation in writing the book. If you are curious, take a look at
www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/followup
Andy Tanenbaum