Wednesday, May 29, 2002 |
16:46 - Maw! Come quick-- I ain't never seen nothin' like this before!
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6105
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This is amazing. Check it out.
Not just the article itself, which is purportedly a Linux Journal treatise by Miles Nordin about how Mac OS X's Mach microkernel is doomed to lag Linux's monolithic kernel in performance. No, what I find interesting is the feedback.
Dozens of responses-- each and every one of which is attacking the article's premises and defending OS X's design.
There are even people in there who hate Apple and who are defending OS X.
I didn't think it was possible. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. But not only is the field of Linux opinion unanimous, it's unanimous against the Linux design principles.
It's also unanimous in presenting benchmarks, specifications, fact sheets, design documents, and references. Useful little tidbits like "Darwin's kernel is not a pure microkernel-- it's a hybrid Mach-based kernel with a microkernel architecture and a BSD-derived monolithic function-call structure, so as to have the best of both worlds", and "Core Audio provides a pathway with less lag into and out of the kernel than any other OS on the market, including the monolithic-kernel Linux", and "Linus Torvalds always did prefer microkernels, and would have used one if it had been available at the time (regardless of that 'piece of crap' comment he made at one point)" are evident. I'm sure that if we let the discussion continue further, someone will mention the extremely cool and elegant hierarchical and modular device-pruning architecture by which OS X loads support during boot and at connection time for existent devices and loads nothing which is not needed, unlike in Linux where you have to recompile the kernel every time you want support for a new device. Well, unless you use modules-- in which case it's no longer monolithic.
Looks to me as though the geek community is rallying to Apple's side even more enthusiastically than I'd thought. When you get people saying that they dislike Apple but they love OS X, you know there's some momentum-- if it's people who hate the products but love the company, it's zealotry. But what we've got here is genuine engineering respect.
FUD doesn't stand a chance.
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