On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com> wrote:

> > So why all is always "Linux
> > based" ?
>
> Because linux has an army of volunteers hacking up drivers for
> everybody's weird undocumented ever-changing hardware.
>
> > "The software architecture is simple - Google Chrome running within a
> > new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel."
>
> It says "linux kernel" with no mention of multi-gigabyes of linux
> libraries and commands.  The optimistic interpretation is that they've
> rediscovered Ron's idea of borrowing a linux kernel as a minimal (sic)
> device driver layer to put a sensible OS on top of, and throwing
> everything else away.


I believe the L4 crowd had been doing that as well for a while.  No offense
to Ron, he's a super-bright guy!  But I'm not sure that idea is patently his
:-).

L4 processes could run on hardware that L4 didn't support by adding L4 to
linux for IPC to deal with device interrupts etc etc.

Someone ported IOKit from Mac OS X to Linux for this as well.  That guy was
promptly hired (killed perhaps) by Apple.  :-)

Dave