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Happy 15th Birthday Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-do-you-get-a-penguin dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It's 15 years already! On August 25th, 1991 Linus Torvalds submitted the famous message to comp.os.minix: 'Hello everybody out there using minix — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things)' Happy Birthday Linux!"

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:to be fair by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Interesting

    GNU/Hurd developers are commited to create THE best possible kernel. They don't have any time pressure so they can freely make experiments in the true spirit of Open Source.

    Right now, there is an ongoing effort to use Coyotos ( http://coyotos.org/ ) to create the first operating system with the proved correctness of its kernel.

    Besides, message-passing interfaces (the core feature of microkernels) can be potentially very efficiently implemented on multicore processors. For example, ARM Fast Address Space Switching (FASS) can potentially make microkernels FASTER than common monolythic ones.

  2. Bah. Statistic of one. by Hillgiant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My 20 month-old daughter bluescreened XP after only 2 minutes of un-attended use. And no, it did not involve pouring juice into the box. Only using a standard keyboard and mouse.

    --
    -
  3. portable... by pe1chl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Simply, I'd say that porting is impossible. It's mostly in C, but most
    people wouldn't call what I write C. It uses every conceivable feature
    of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the
    386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging (not to disk
    yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386
    dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data - max 64 tasks
    in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough cookies).

    And now it is running on, what, 20 different architectures?
    With or without MMU, running hundreds...thousands of tasks of up to
    gigabytes in size. Of course, of that version nothing will have
    remained. Not even the name, because that came later.