2009/7/8 erik quanstrom <quans...@coraid.com>: > you say > >> I think, Google did not choose Plan 9 due lack of device drivers, poor >> IPv6 support and confusing redundant fragment of code lurking around in >> /sys/boot or 9load, but a compared with Linux a compact, clean and >> much more efficient FreeBSD could definitely have been a better choice. > > but then > >> But that's [linux] still a huge hog and spaghetti code; needs a lot of >> cleanup, >> which I don't think is going to happen in the near future. > > i think you're going to have to pick a lane.
I don't think so. We already have IPv6 support and it's not that bad. Having more drivers and supported commodity architectures would be a good thing. I'd love to do this, but I don't think anybody's going to match my salary to port drivers, do ACPI, add amd64 support for workstations, etc. I don't think that adding drivers would make it a `huge hog' or require `spaghetti code'. (Linux kernel code isn't really `spaghetti code', it's just poorly organized and some of the architectural decisions, I'd classify as `spaghetti architecture' -- once you find it though, the code isn't so bad to read, in general). > and having fought with both the linux and plan 9 boot process, > i can assure you that the plan 9 boot process is simplier and more > straightfoward. /sys/boot is trivial compared to a linux initrd. I can stand up for this statement. Not only is it trivial compared to initrd, the following of the boot process is much easier. I was doing some work on an ARM architecture port for Plan 9 (for an already dead product, the Siemens SimPAD). Figuring out where the *(#Q*(#...@$ source for the boot stuff was in Linux was a huge hassle and took me days. > - erik > >
