Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
On Mon, 07 May 2012 22:40:01 +0800 XeCycle wrote:
Violations of this philosophy can be easily found. The Linux kernel is such one. It is already big, with many misfeatures, or "anitfeature"s; but we all use it, right? Linus said such a design simplifies the intercommunication between kernel modules.
I disagree, your obviously clutching at straws, OpenBSD, no modules but monolithic yes. Many argue for and against monolithic or kernels such as QNX where drivers can't hang the kernel (atleast in theory). This is irrelevent. Simple tools do become more than they're parts. grep, cut, tr, cat and do they're particular job well and with less bugs.
You're right, but --- you still need something complex to do with complex jobs, so I'd say there's nothing wrong with these complex tools --- right? In the traditional pipe way of using these Unix tools, each are acting quite like a finite automata, and you join them sequentially to perform the job. But a finite automata is not Turing-complete, you'll need to do a lot more when you need something missing in this paradigm. So we see many sys admins go with Perl.
Init is a simple job.
Depends on what you want out of it. You can surely hand off parts of the job to something else, say, user session management; but if that job needs to talk to init to do better, why not just integrate it with init.
The main case you didn't bring up is perhaps where speed is paramount. I can't think of any others of the top of my head and certainly none that apply to whether the ultimate dependency, init, should be complex.
Imagine a system where the kernel had been stripped down to kilobytes yet init was megabytes.
That would be a waste of brain cells. If several MiBs is surely needed to make the system usable, it's okay to call them together as "kernel".
p.s. I wouldn't mind knowing more about event driven too. I believe I was given an impression of what it was when systemd first hit ubuntu but I can't remember finding out exactly. A quick google just now turned up nothing.
IIRC Ubuntu goes with Upstart the first time I heard of them. -- Carl Lei (XeCycle) Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University OpenPGP public key: 7795E591 Fingerprint: 1FB6 7F1F D45D F681 C845 27F7 8D71 8EC4 7795 E591