RE: [tlug] Asus EEE

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

burlingk@example.com writes:

 > I see...  So basically, it is Linux pretending to be BSD...
 > chottohendayo...

No, that's what emulators like the NetBSD Linux emulation layer do.

Darwin is more interesting than that (if you're interested in
internals).  You might want to look up the Torvalds-Tannenbaum
flamewar (where Linus defended monolithic kernels and IMHO demolished
Tannebaum's advocacy of microkernels like Mach; I think the general
uselessness of the HURD after 25 years of GNU makes it plain that
microkernels of the Mach style suck ;-).  Also, the CMU papers giving
a high-level overview for the design of Mach aren't too tough a read.
Comparable to the (otherwise incomparable :-) Bell System Technical
Journal issue on Unix and C (1978!) in level.

One of the original Linux distros for the Mac was based on a
Darwin-style approach (using the CMU Linux single server on top of CMU
Mach, IIRC).

It's only more than a decade after that debate (and two decades after
the decision to base the HURD on Mach, IIRC) that we're starting to
see the fruits of the microkernel approach, in a radically different
application: virtual monitors (like Xen and VMware).  But here,
instead of running OS services as processes on top of a small memory
and device manager, we run whole OSes.  (NB this is my own revisionist
interpretation, I don't know what real OS researchers think.)