On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Richard Miller <9f...@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
