[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[akosela@andykosela.com (Andy Kosela)]

On Thursday, January 4, 2018, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 1:56 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:29:59AM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> > 16MB of memory) and installed 386bsd. I also played with
>> > linux-0.11 but I recall reading something about Linus using
>> > SysV as a reference and that was the end of my interest in
>> > linux!
>>
>> As far as I know that was never true.  We used used POSIX as a
>> reference mainly because it was more easily available as a
>> specification.  So that meant that we implemented termios support, and
>> not termio, or the BSD variant.  The networking layer was all BSD
>> sockets; we certainly never implemented STREAMS, for goodness sake!  :-)
>>
>
> There was a natural bias towards SysV interfaces, which highlighted the
> differences with BSD interfaces in some areas and may have left that
> impression...
>
> Linus certainly had access to SysV or SysV derived systems <snip>
>
>

First and foremost Linus was a MINIX user which was based on UNIX V7.  That
could explain his preference for SysV.  People tend to forget that it was
MINIX that sparked Linus' interest in the operating systems.  The first
public announcement of Linux was posted on the MINIX newsgroup.

Linux was basically a continuation of MINIX -- small, simple project, but
heavily optimized for i386 and with a vision to become a production ready
system instead of educational one.  Its simplicity and freshness definitely
attracted many people who wanted to have a small, simple Unix-like system
on their PC.  Sometimes it is just better to start something from scratch
instead of relying on legacy and bloated solutions from the past.

BSD was already bloated and big. It was technically superior at that time,
but at the cost of complexity.  And it took a lot of effort to polish
386BSD to the point it was stable -- it definitely wasnt in the beginning.

--Andy
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