OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/18441/Linux_0_10_How_Linux_Became_Usable Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:26:57 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Comment by Almafeta http://osnews.com/thread?262704 http://osnews.com/thread?262704 Linux was still light and efficient software at this stage, despite its very alpha stability and functionality -- not even 2500 lines. (I didn't know that it had jumped from 0.03 to 0.10 though -- I thought that 0.04 through 0.09 were just lost as trivialia or something.)

Hmm. Gives me the idea for a crazy project...

By mistake, I auto dialed my hard disc and basically I overwrote the operating system with the dial strings.


Auto-dialing a *hard drive*? That is a goof of epic proportions -- and apparently, if it stirred him to develop Linux, it was the kind of goofs epics are made of. Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Almafeta) Comments RE: Comment by Almafeta http://osnews.com/thread?262709 http://osnews.com/thread?262709 It's an impressive goof. Auto-dialing a hard drive... that doesn't happen every day ... I'm sitting here with the biggest smile in a very long time ;) Sat, 11 Aug 2007 22:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dylansmrjones) Comments RE[2]: Comment by Almafeta http://osnews.com/thread?262728 http://osnews.com/thread?262728 It's one good reason to keep character and block devices very separate ;)

Unfortunately, being able to treat block devices as character devices is quite handy. Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (nevali) Comments 0.10 scheduler comment http://osnews.com/thread?262730 http://osnews.com/thread?262730 I particularly enjoyed this comment, on kernel/sched.c:

* 'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There
* probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well
* in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pureza) Comments RE: 0.10 scheduler comment http://osnews.com/thread?262749 http://osnews.com/thread?262749 ROFL =)

I think someone should try pluging it in recent kernel. Maybe if would fix all current issues? =) Sun, 12 Aug 2007 02:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rx182) Comments RE[2]: 0.10 scheduler comment http://osnews.com/thread?262757 http://osnews.com/thread?262757 Sorry, you'd have too many dependencies to resolve first. ;-) Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flanque) Comments RE: 0.10 scheduler comment http://osnews.com/thread?262769 http://osnews.com/thread?262769 This is a pretty good algorithm, all things considered. Remember, Linux won't support SMP for another four years. Traversing the task list 2-4 times isn't great, but O(N) is perfectly acceptable for dozens of tasks. Some commercial UNIX schedulers still scale linearly.

They also still use the "C = C/2 + P" function to give sleepers a bounded priority boost over hogs. Maverick sysadmins can tune the denominator these days, but the theory is identical. Yes, the algorithm is non-deterministic fuzzy math, but it's simple and it works. Sun, 12 Aug 2007 06:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (butters) Comments mcc linux images http://osnews.com/thread?262780 http://osnews.com/thread?262780 see http://www.manlug.org/content/blogsection/5/71/ for qemu images of mcc linux. Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ssam) Comments Heh http://osnews.com/thread?262782 http://osnews.com/thread?262782 Well, this shows that Linus' word is not gospel. He made a lot of silly comments and tons of design f--kups for others to clean up.

That said, boy, that's one clever dude. Sun, 12 Aug 2007 10:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (predictor) Comments RE: Heh http://osnews.com/thread?262836 http://osnews.com/thread?262836 Design is evolutionary and synchronous with the hardware and functional loads of the time.And remember, that Linux wasn't started to create an enterprise operating system. That sort of happened by accident.

Originally, it was a kernel to run on cheap x86 hardware.

People's learning is also evolutionary. Finally, point me out to any place where I can check on your ability to write a kernel at the same age when Linus started Linux. Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (porcel) Comments