Linus Torvalds Speaks

An interview with Linus Torvalds by Richard Morris is really a reason for taking the time and read.

I don’t know about you but I really enjoy hearing what the creator of Linux has to say so here are some quotes from the interview that I found through Foogazi.com.

‘In your famous debate with Tanenbaum on micro versus monolithic LT: kernels you say that “From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint [micro kernels are better]”. Could you foresee a day where the practical matches the theoretical and aesthetical and the Linux Kernel does become obsolete?’

LT:

‘I can certainly imagine the Linux kernel becoming obsolete - anything else would just be sad, really, in the big picture. That said having now worked in the OS area for the past, what, 17 years or so, I don’t think it’s micro kernels per se that would make it happen.

IOW, having done “traditional” kernels for that long, I’ve become convinced that they are done the way they are done traditionally for the same reason wheels are round - it’s just the right way to do it: The same way that wheels are round because it’s practical and they just roll better that way, you don’t want to split a monolithic kernel up into many smaller things. In a kernel, you basically need to know what all the pieces are doing to make certain global decisions, and that’s hard if you split things up too much.

But what can make a big deal to what is the best way of doing things is simply hardware changes or changes in what users do and how they interact with their computers. And while I don’t see any big fundamental shift in how things are done, I think that is ultimately what may make Linux obsolete. -not in the near future, though. Software and hardware have an amazing inertia, and ways of doing things tend to stay around for decades. So I’m not exactly worried.

From a man with a vision.