This is my favorite part:<p>"Linus Benedict Torvalds
In article <1992Jan29.2...@klaava.Helsinki.FI> I wrote:
>Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply.<p>And reply I did, with complete abandon, and no thought for good taste and netiquette. Apologies to ast, and thanks to John Nall for a friendy "that's not how it's done"-letter. I over-reacted, and am now composing a (much less acerbic) personal letter to ast. Hope nobody was turned away from linux due to it being (a) possibly obsolete (I still think
that's not the case, although some of the criticisms are valid) and (b) written by a hothead :-)<p>Linus "my first, and hopefully last flamefest" Torvalds"<p>This HN comment posted from a Linux machine in 2015. :)
I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways.<p>1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around.<p>2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unikernels [1] (and where they might be used [2]). Linux isn't going anywhere but these new approaches have value and were being discussed as long ago as 1992. Of course, the author got things wrong but that's par for course. It's more interesting to see ideas that are resurfacing. Incidentally, ARM was a RISC chip and now dominates Intel on mobile devices.<p>I prefer the second approach. So to anyone poking fun at the author, please consider that maybe this is one aspect of living in the future [3], albeit much further than than most (market timing is always underrated and academics tend to think further ahead than most people). We can also remind ourselves that 'Better' is a tricky and subjective thing to define (cf VHS tapes vs Betamax).<p>[1] <a href="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628" rel="nofollow">http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628</a><p>[2] <a href="http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/" rel="nofollow">http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/</a><p><i>(disclaimer: I'm involved with both the above projects)</i><p>[3] <a href="http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html</a>
Tanenbaum said that Torvalds would not get a good grade on his course, epic.
"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is
a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not
get a high grade for such a design :-)"<p>Perfect display of how universities are good at judging people about how well they know how to "play the game" (and usually that involves conforming to whatever frame of mind your professor thinks is right).
There seems to be a response by "the" (please rise) Ken Thompson:<p>"viewpoint may be largely unrelated to its usefulness. Many if not most of the software we use is probably obsolete according to the latest design criteria. Most users could probably care less if the internals of the operating system they use is obsolete. They are rightly more interested in its performance and capabilities at the user level.<p>"I would generally agree that microkernels are probably the wave of the future. However, it is in my opinion easier to implement a monolithic kernel. It is also easier for it to turn into a mess in a hurry as it is modified."
Before we get into - "Oh not this again!" and "Duh! but Linux Won!" and "Microkernels are still a better design"...<p>Remember, today's lucky 10,000...<p><a href="http://xkcd.com/1053/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/1053/</a><p>Actually, I always enjoy reading this whenever it comes up. I was just about to start a university computing science degree course at this time and was reading Tanenbaum in preparation. This was a debate that was alive for years throughout the computing community I was part of.<p>In the end reality came down to what always wins in computing (and in life too).<p><pre><code> Running code beats design. Design is always 'better'.</code></pre>
The problem with this whole debate is that Linus was 'more wrong' than Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum made plenty of mistakes with Minix which <i>also</i> make it more of a macrokernel than a true microkernel.<p>A true microkernel does one thing and one thing only: pass messages.<p>Now that's an ideal and in the real world you don't get to have your ideals realized so rather than to be able to realize this spherical cow you're going to have add in a few more system calls to make it work but you'll end up with something a lot closer to plan9 or QnX and compared to those Linux is very very old hat indeed, it's basically a re-run of the 70's state of the art with a a whole pile of modern day hardware drivers and other goodies thrown in.<p>Tanenbaums biggest mistake was to try to monetize Minix through Prentice-Hall, if he'd just tossed it out there it would have picked up steam a lot quicker, but likely he too had bills to pay and his expenses at the time were probably a lot larger than Linuses, and so history was made.<p>So, Linus was obsolete, but so was Minix and the future as we could have had it is still waiting to happen. And when it does you'll finally appreciate just how obsolete Linux was back in 92, and how much more obsolete it is today.<p>Until then it's like democracy: not perfect but the best we've got (without shelling out lots of license fees for something better).
Tanenbaum admitted at EuroBSDCon last year[1] that he was wrong about BSD and he should have turned Minix into a BSD, which he now has, with Minix3 borrowing NetBSD userspace, build system and so on.<p>[1] <a href="https://va.ludost.net/files/eurobsdcon/2014/Vitosha/03.Saturday/07.A%20reimplementation%20of%20NetBSD%20based%20on%20a%20microkernel%20-%20Andy%20Tanenbaum.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://va.ludost.net/files/eurobsdcon/2014/Vitosha/03.Satur...</a>
Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking.<p>Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to<p><i>While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. </i>
How feasible is it to radically refactor an operating system? Would it be possible to gradually incorporate all the insights of operating system research into Linux/BSD/$otherProductionReadyOS or is it always necessary to start again from scratch?
The following statement puts things in perspective, doesn't it.<p>"Speeds of 200 MIPS and more are likely in the coming years."<p>Now, a modern Mac Pro can do 488250 million instructions per second. Needless to say, we've had progress in these last couple of decades.
It's amazing to see how a 20 year old university student was debating with well known OS researcher and he was so confident.<p>Btw Linus called DOS as DOG:<p>> You mention OS/360 and MS-DOG as examples of bad designs
as they were hardware-dependent, and I agree.
I did some small contributions to GNU Hurd years ago, but still, this made me giggle:<p><i>Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5.</i>
Is it still possible to asscess comp.os.minix old archives through NNTP somewhere? Google Groups have the old emails but I can't find a way to read them in a local email client.