[TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 11:00:15AM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> While I use linux, it's no longer a system that I trust in any way.  It's
> huge, bloated, rats-nest undocumented code.  Yes, I know that a small
> percentage of people like Ted spend a lot of time on the code and therefore
> know it well.  But I find it an impenetrable mess.  When I first had a need
> to look at the UNIX kernel, it was easy to figure out what was going on.  Not
> so with linux.  Of course, I'm getting old and maybe not as good at this stuff
> as I used to be.

Jon, I think you might be old enough to have run v7, if not, like me, you
have read the Lions book and loved it.  That kernel didn't do much, it was
uniprocessor, block interrupts design, no networking, it was very basic.
Amazingly nice to read, but it didn't do a lot.

Which is part of the reason we liked it.  I loved SunOS 4.x but it was
also a uniprocessor kernel (Greg Limes tried to make it SMP but it was not
a kernel that wanted to be SMP).  I loved it because I could understand
it and it was a bit more complex than v7.

The problem space that kernels address these days include SMP, NUMA,
and all sorts of other stuff.  I'm not sure I could understand the Linux
kernel even if I were in my prime.  It's a harder space, you need to
know a lot more, be skilled at a lot more.

My take is we're old dudes yearning for the days when everything
was simple.  Remember when out of order wasn't a thing?  Yeah, me too,
I gave up on trying to debug kernels when kadb couldn't tell me what I
was looking at.

--lm