On Nov 11, 2017, at 5:16 AM, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 09:38:45AM +0200, Georgi Guninski wrote:
On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:07:19AM -0500, John Newman wrote:
On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:02:05AM -0500, John Newman wrote:
It's funny looking back at the ancient flame war between Tannenbaum & Torvalds... and now it turns out there is a copy of Minix running at ring -3 in every Intel CPU out there! Sweet fucking christmas.
Slashdot coverage:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/11/07/1041236/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip...
Is minix so better than some BSD? AFAICT it has much lesser user base and is less tested.
I imagine Intel chose Minix because its so much smaller than BSD. I don't have LOC numbers in front of me, but I'm guessing its at least an order of magnitude smaller... perfectly sized (and licensed) for their fucked up purposes.
And why google chose the linux kernel for android? The BSD license allows closing the source.
I guess they're trying to "do no evil" lol. The whole point seems to be to get away from the BSD license, so that users can have the source to the various binary blobs doing fuck-knows-what on their CPUs…
I misread this question as relating to the Google presentation on replacing Minix in your Intel CPU with Linux… not android! Whoops. As to Android… Linux probably had much better ARM support than *BSD when Google chose it for Android. Definitely a lot more developers. And they don’t seem to care about keeping most of Android open source, which is why you there are so many good, different, ROMS to choose from for your android phone (generally, depending on the model).. from cyanogenmod, to whatever else :) Anyway, I’m just speculating on the above. Maybe it also comes back to their purported “do no evil” bullshit - they wanted to get on the open source bandwagon.
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