Re: Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture.

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
20 Jun 1999 18:05:28 GMT

In article <199906201239.IAA11200@snark.thyrsus.com>,
Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
>You're probably right; I'm told all EROS actually does at this point
>is run its own debugging and benchmarking tools. Still, the fact that
>the test kernel can be that small is IMO an argument that the design
>is sound.

Why?

What is the correlation between "small" and "good"?

There's seldom any very strong correlation. Often the correlation is
negative.

Linux started out as 10k lines of code. Was that good? It's not 1.5M
lines of code. Is that bad?

Assuming something does the same thing as another, and is more efficient
at doing it (smaller, faster, whatever), that's good. But microkernels
are based on the notion that small is good even if it is NOT capable to
do the same things: a fundamentally flawed argument.

So mind explaining why you're using that argument?

Linus

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