Yeah this is just an old defunct religious war bullcrap between Microkernel vs Monolithic kernel, and it ignores some fundamental hardware issues.
Microkernels may make it "easier to write drivers" (the most common marketing baloney I've heard about them) but a monolithic kernel recompiled with the only device drivers needed for the hardware it runs on, is faster in many cases. This is why OpenWRT's * DD-WRT's and FreshTomato's Linux kernels as well as the distributions used by Netgear/Linksys/Belkin/etc. are monolithic today, as well as Cisco's IOS for their routers and Catalyst ethernet switches. Linux with PREEMPT_RT enabled is also pretty much a monolithic kernel. And, I think, Apple's iOS for their Macs are - although the power gained by doing this Apple wastes on stupid desktop eye candy. Speed mattered back "in the olden days" of the 8086 and 80286, antique single core CPUs in single CPU motherboards. (and still does for least-cost designed monolithic hardware) Today, not so much - with one holdover which is that the network stack in Linux still runs slower than the BSD network stack. For all Linus' claims, the Linux kernel today is far, far fatter and has more crap in it than was ever envisioned, and the BSD distributions have incorporated LKM's, becoming less monolithic and more Microkernel, both major forks of Unix have essentially converged in design - however ALL have become far more highly complex. NONE of the "Unix-alike" distributions today embody the ideas of the original Unix OS with the exception of the Big Three router distributions, OpenWRT, DD-WRT and Fresh Tomato - although, honestly, even OpenWRT is getting close to needing to be sent to a fat farm for a much needed diet. >From an end-users or even application developers POV, Linux and BSD's are the same interface. It's only under the hood where the major differences are. The issue of "which fork won, BSD or Linux" has become a moot issue. They both have one. The question is "what has the most support for what YOU are running and what works the best for what YOU are doing?" For enterprise routing in the datacenter which requires speed, as well as enterprise network applications that require absolute rock solid stability, I use FreeBSD and select appropriate hardware based on the i386 x64 platform, for application servers, mail and web, I use Linux, for low-power, slow remote routing, wifi Aps and such that are not mission-critical, I use Linux. For end user interface -Windows. Don't forget that the biggest reason the "major Desktop Linuxes" are popular today is because people have recognized the exact same pressures in the business that drove Windows to become dominant over MacOS on the desktop - large scale computing requires standardization to achieve a critical mass that triggers application development and community support. You may think Windows does not have community support but that's false - every time a coworker turns to another coworker in a business and asks "how do you do X" about their Windows desktops - that's the same community support as on this mailing list. You need critical mass for this - and since virtually all needs today in computing are covered by one of the operating systems out there - we probably are never going to see in the future, these kinds of religious wars again. It's sort of been the end of an era for a while, now. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Russell Senior Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2025 10:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PLUG] 2001 Linus talk at Computer History Museum I just stumbled onto this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w Most of it is pretty much well-known canon for linux nerds, but one thing at 1h18m52 really caught my attention and got me to send this message, and that was a big shout out for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an org I also think is important and worthy of support. The rest of it is worth a watch, if you have some idle time, the technical bits are old now, being a couple decades stale, but it is fun to get a retrospective feel for what people were thinking about back then. Also, there are a bunch of people in the comments noting that one of the questions is from Ken Thompson. -- Russell Senior [email protected]
