[Arm-netbook] Olimex is making an "open-source" laptop...

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 7. February 2017 15.29.59 Matt Campbell wrote:
> On 2/7/2017 8:19 AM, Paul Boddie wrote:
> > Plus, I don't really see Linux-the-kernel as the future, anyway.
> 
> Why not? It has such momentum now; it would be a lot of work to port all
> the drivers to anything else.

There's so much hardware and software churn these days that the driver 
availability argument probably isn't as important as it once was. So much 
stuff is probably being done for individual products that people are 
undoubtedly having to write code for new hardware, anyway. I guess Linux still 
has the advantages of being something people know and having driver frameworks 
that people can use.

However, various driver frameworks inside Linux seem to have changed over the 
years, hopefully for the better, meaning that unless the drivers of interest 
are on the speedboat (and maybe they were but fell off the back at some 
point), they're unusable now. Linux doesn't have a monopoly on such 
frameworks, though: there's nothing to stop other solutions offering something 
much better.

Meanwhile, all the bravado about monolithic kernels being best and there being 
no tolerance for any performance decrease whatsoever (not even 15% or whatever 
the number was) seems absurd in this age of endless exploits and after-the-
fact mitigations, with a lot of Linux deployments being done on top of 
microkernels/hypervisors now, anyway.

Paul