Linus Torvalds "I HATE p

On Monday 03 October 2005 12:14, Bob stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Just because there is room for improvement doesn't mean that the Linux kernel as it currently exists would be inadequate or failing its purpose.

Hardly. They do a lot more than that, and both Alan Cox and Marcelo Tossati hav their own subbranches of the development process, in which they test new patches or add some of their own.

IBM is actively cooperating on the Linux kernel. I'm sure they make plenty of suggestions. A microkernel design isn't one of them, and they seem to have full confidence in Gnu-Linux.

Oh and by the way, AIX doesn't use a microkernel either. And neither does SGI IRIX or Sun Solaris.

You obviously don't understand what I said. You were nagging about how the Linux kernel multi-tasks inefficiently because it multi-tasks at the process level rather than at the thread level, something you probably only found out in-deep at the moment you were researching on the stuff you pasted in.

I responded by explaining to you that the Linux kernel does use thread-based multi-tasking for kernelspace processes. It does however not multi-task on a thread level for where userspace processes are concerned, but thiscouldbe changed for the future.

Either way, it's not that important, as such a level of multi-tasking is not required for the many other purposes of Gnu-Linux beside the desktop and embedded implementations, and embedded devices cannot even be compared to anything else, really. Many of them even use a RTOS underneath the Linux kernel.

I'm sure they will improve on the design if the need arises. However, they are engineers, and they know best what they have created. There is not a single reason in the world to regard the POSIX threading model as flawed, since it does what it needs to do perfectly well, i.e. without any crashes and with a sufficiently high level of efficiency and performance.

This battle is imaginary. Neither Linus Torvalds nor Richard Stallman could care less about what you install on your desktop. And frankly, I couldn't care less myself.

The battle of the desktop exists only in the minds of the Microsofties who now feel that their preferred operating system may have to give way to something totally different and technically far more superior on the computers of home and office users, which is yet another place where they've lost ground, as professional workstations, high-powered servers and supercomputers proved to be out of the league of Windows a long time ago already.

Oh really? Name one? And you had better make it good...

Yeah, it's totally up to date with the carelessness and stupidity among modern IT specialists.

OS-2 was cutting edge because it offered the owner of an i386 machine - and the i286 before that - access to all the memory in his computer, while DOS couldn't look beyond the 8086-8088 instructionset.

OS-2 was also cutting edge because it was the first operating system with a graphical user interface for the Intel x86 architecture, and because it had multi-tasking.

Note however that OS-2 1.0 did not have a GUI. It had a DOSSHELL-like user interface, from which commandlines could be started.

The fact that UNIX already pre-existed OS-2 or NT does by no means make it outdated. UNIX has always continued to evolve, and it had (and still has) far more power than OS-2 or NT. It was just not built around the concept of a standalone workstation.

Hogwash! Those who say that UNIX is outdated don't know first thing about UNIX. But I can very well imagine such a statement coming from the likes of people for whom a computer is a kitchen sink, needs to be operated with a mouse and hosts one user only.

It's not more odd than that people can get pbuttionate over post stamps, over food, over a movie, or over whatever.

I consider it far more crazy when those hot blondes at the beach go frantic because one of them happens to be wearing the same color of bikini as the other.

I also consider it far more crazy that some people buy a BMW or a Porsche so that the guy next door can see how much money he makes.

I presume the world considers everything that doesn't follow its rules as crazy, but just as everything in the Universe is relative, so is the world's opinion. Look at where the human race is today and think about how long it's already existed without having escaped its madness.

Besides, if arguing about an operating system is so crazy, then why are you here?

The word "dishonest" in that sentence does not apply to me, but all the more to Microsoft. I consider you buttaultive because you had picked up a rumor or a whim of some programmers on a website and you came to use it here as a subversion on the efficiency of threading in the Linux kernel.

Only when you met disagreement did you look it up further and copied and pasted those comments here, while failing to understand what you had just pasted since your notion on what an operating system is or what purposes it may serve is fundametally flawed.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered Gnu-Linux user #223157)