Linked by Emmanuel Marty on Thu 2nd Sep 2004 07:36 UTC
As a programmer and manager of embedded software products for a living, I think that operating system programming is so much fun that it will eventually be outlawed. I've previously published two articles on OSNews, So, you want to write
an operating system and Climbing
the kernel mountain, and tried to summarize my experience in designing operating system kernels as well as technical traps that can be easily avoided.
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JBQ summarized the article quite sharply. Wrt. other people's comments :
1. This is OSNews, not GameNews.
2. There was no freely modifiable and redistributable, general purpose kernel when Linus started developing his own. I can't speak for Linus, however if BSD had fully cleared up license issues 3 years earlier than it did, I believe that Linux would never have seen the light of day.
3. You can become an expert in memory management, scheduling issues and kernel hacker extraordinaire without writing a kernel from scratch that will end up being inferior in almost every single category. I believe that talented people like Ingo Molnar and Matt Dillon fall in that category. Your good idea, that nobody else has thought of, might reach people and help them in their daily lives a lot quicker.
4. I'm nobody to tell anyone what to do. People are free to work on a kernel if they don't ambition to improve the state of affairs. That's my personal goal; it's not directly related to making money.
5. Mathematicians do not research the best way to do additions and multiplications these days, if that would be the "kernel" of math. The best minds work on higher-level concepts on top, usually way on top, of these basics.
6. @ Ceaser, although you're free to formulate an opinion on a product that you don't know about, Consumer Electronics products don't use standard hardware for the most part, it's designed for cost and custom assembled, therefore the customers write their own drivers. The OS we shipped is robust and has a much higher feature set (vs. footprint) than what our customers typically use, and that wasn't the issue. The issue was to port millions of lines of code.
7. @ "de Selby": martyr is exactly the right term.
Keep the comments coming (good and bad) :-)