minix - tannenbaum won!

[John Newman]

> On Nov 11, 2017, at 5:16 AM, John Newman <jnn at 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-operating-system
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>> 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.

>> 
> 
> --
> GPG fingerprint: 17FD 615A D20D AFE8 B3E4  C9D2 E324 20BE D47A 78C7

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