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