[TUHS] Re: FD 2

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 9:59 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

> On Monday, January 30, 2023, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:45 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> > On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>> > > Plan 9 was different, and a lot of people who were familiar with Unix
>> > > didn't like that, and were not interested in trying out a different
>> > > way if it meant that they couldn't bring their existing mental models
>> > > and workflows into the new environment unchanged.
>> > >
>> > > At one point it struck me that Plan 9 didn't succeed as a widespread
>> > > replacement for Unix/Linux because it was bad or incapable, but
>> > > rather, because people wanted Linux, and not plan9.
>> >
>> > Many people make that mistake.  New stuff instead of extend old stuff.
>>
>> Some would argue that's not a mistake. How else do we innovate if
>> we're just incrementally polishing what's come before?
>
>
> I would argue that Linux actually did a lot of things differently. It
> tried to conform to POSIX, but still there were a lof of fresh ideas that
> actually took off.
>

Yes, but one legacy of that was Linux tried to use the System V ABI
everywhere with extensions, and that means errno values are different in
linux for different platforms, signals are a bit different etc.


> It was not possible in the free BSD world which inherited much more from
> the old Unix world.
>

It's been totally possible in the BSD world. The vm systems have been
redone in ways that make the original look different, the tty layers are
now completely different (something bde couldn't accomplish in the early
days), the autoconf / device probing/attaching is different, the fact that
removable devices extend well beyond disk packs, SMP support (several
different flavors), bus independent dma and device register access, etc.

Now granted, in the earliest of days some things seemed too sacrosanct, but
all the BSDs quickly learned being too rigid didn't generally have good
outcomes (though some corners of the systems have taken longer than others
to realize that).

Warner

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