[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Dan Cross]

In article <un2hq1$2vhkg$3 at dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 23:21:23 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> Take, for instance, the lack of internal kernel interfaces and gregkh's
>> insistence that, not only are they unnecessary, they are _bad_: this can
>> make things very hard to work with, with multiple generations of partial
>> interfaces all coresident at the same time, and little incentive to
>> clean up the resulting complexity or mess.
>
>Could be worse. You could be required to carry all that baggage around 
>forever.
>
>GregKH made this point some years back, about the state of respective USB 
>support in Windows versus Linux. At that point, Microsoft had rewritten 
>its USB stack three times, and so it was carrying around three different 
>driver APIs, and as long as there were third-party drivers using the 
>obsolete interfaces, would have to continue doing that essentially 
>forever.
>
>At the same time, Linux had also rewritten its USB stack three times. But 
>it had the luxury of starting pretty much from scratch each time, without 
>having to carry around a lot of legacy baggage, because all the drivers 
>included in the Linux kernel source tree could be updated at the same 
>time.
>
>Just one of many reasons why Linux is a much trimmer and more efficient OS 
>than Windows.

You are conflating _internal_ interfaces and _external_
interfaces.  Linux has none of the former; it has strong
backwards compatibility guarantees for the latter ("thou shalt
not break userspace").

The lack of internal interfaces mean that it's difficult to
evolve kernel internals without significant churn.  E.g.,
filesystems are deeply entwined with the virtual memory
subsystem, as is networking; everything speaks directly to
the process code, etc.

Linux is extraordinarily bloated.

	- Dan C.