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Yeah, but it won't look like anything that you're used to. Unless you're used to Forth. (I ported a copy of Laxen & Perry Forth 83 to a TRS-80 model 4p back in the day and have a copy of pfe installed.)
Terrific, Richard! We'll likely agree that Chuck Moore is brilliant.
Distribution: Solaris 11.4, Oracle Linux, Mint, Debian/WSL
Posts: 9,789
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rob.rice
OK then what is the rationale behind micro kernels
Modularity and Security/Reliability.
The modularity concept was obviously a clear advantage and has been adopted by most so called monolithic kernels like Unix and later Linux by the means of kernel modules that can be loaded and unloaded on demand.
About security/reliability, the idea is buggy code running at the kernel level has the power to crash the whole machine while the same code running in user mode can be restarted after failure with minor disruption if any. Isolating portions of code prevent also components to misuse/lock shared structures and objects. The current trend toward virtualization (hypervisors, containers and the likes), which is similar in concept shows that the idea was not that bad after all.
I don't have much experience outside of the GNU Linux world, but I am guessing there are plenty of packages out there that can replace GNU, such as ones used in Unix or BSD systems that can easily replace the GNU equivalents. Let me know if I am wrong.
Sure. You could even replace all those base ones with low feature versions from busybox. I have a PoE camera that does this. Additionally, slackware's initrd images use busybox.
You just have to be very careful about what features you try to use if writing a system script. Like recursively searching files for a string has to be done with
[code]
grep string `find -type f`
[code]
essentially passing all file names as the list of files to search.
EDIT:
It seems like newer versions have the recurse on grep. My camera doesn't have it.
I don't have much experience outside of the GNU Linux world, but I am guessing there are plenty of packages out there that can replace GNU, such as ones used in Unix or BSD systems that can easily replace the GNU equivalents. Let me know if I am wrong.
As far i know: no, there are no such packages.
Without the Gnu-base system and development you get exactly that:
Nothing.
Inside or outside of a system with a Linux kernel.
In Debian you can easily replace the Linux-kernel with a kFreeBSD-kernel: You still use Gnu. But you can't do it the other way around.
To a certain degree you can make use of the Hurd too.
So: afaik you will need Gnu.
There is no way around it.
As long you want a free OS, of course.
Distribution: Solaris 11.4, Oracle Linux, Mint, Debian/WSL
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I agree all mainstream and almost all other Linux based OSes are strongly depending on Gnu software and are so Gnu/Linux OSes. There is however the heirloom project with the goal to provide a Unix (non Gnu) userland:
The *BSDs cut down their GNU dependence quite a bit and if put in a rough spot they could probably live without GNU as well (though at the moment they'd be missing a few packages). Of course I'm only talking about the base system. gcc is a big package but there are other compilers out there, and though living 100% GNU-free *right now* in BSD would be a little painful (since some of the possible BSD replacements are not as good as the GNU tools [yet?]), saying you cannot live in a *nix system without GNU (at least as a base system) isn't 100% correct. Just as GNU/Linux is more than Linux, it is also more than GNU, and the open source community is more than both.
Well, we have Apple and QNX as successful distributors of micro-kernels ... Micro-kernels do work in desktop operating systems. Even pico-kernels such as Forth are possible to use.
Good point with QNX but I think atleast with Apple and several other attempts they would be categorized as a hybrid kernel, like a monolithic kernel on top of a micro one -- still seems there have been many attempts to make a mainstream microkernel with very little success, currently.
There are systems that contain Linux and not GNU; Android is an example.
Android is very different from the GNU/Linux system—because it doesn't contain GNU, only Linux. In effect, it's a totally different system. If you think of the whole system as “Linux”, you find it necessary to say things like, “Android contains Linux, but it isn't Linux, because it doesn't have the usual Linux [sic] libraries and utilities [meaning the GNU system].” Android contains just as much of Linux as GNU/Linux does. What it doesn't have is GNU.
Last edited by CincinnatiKid; 09-17-2010 at 07:31 AM.
Reason: Forgot something
There's a link around here, I believe it was a story that appeared in the News forum on LQ, posted by LXer magazine, which leads to a recent interview with Richard Stallman, wherein he (Stallman) talks a bit about the early days of the GNU OS and of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) and about the situation regarding Linux vs Hurd as the kernel in our OS's - have a look around for it; if you can't find it I'll have a look for it later on. In the article, he says something like (I'm not quoting except for the words, works OK), "The Hurd kernel was intended to be the kernel for GNU OS's, but the Linux kernel works OK meanwhile".
This would sound like an interesting project, and not to dampen anyone who is interested in HURD but, since HURD itself is just so far (very very far) behind in development (years), compared to GNU, is it really worth it? Considering the amount of development (or lack thereof) on HURD, it just seems rather irrelevant except perhaps in a case of educational or just pure curiosity. Other than that, I just don't see any real practical reason for HURD.
This would sound like an interesting project, and not to dampen anyone who is interested in HURD but, since HURD itself is just so far (very very far) behind in development (years), compared to GNU, is it really worth it?
How is Hurd far behind in development compared to GNU, since Hurd is GNU? Maybe you meant it is far behind compared to Linux?
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