From: jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) Subject: Re: I hate Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 00:07:06 GMT
Brandon S. Allbery (bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org) wrote:
:
: > Resource miserly, small? Hmm, well I don't know much about other Unix
: >systems but this is the largest OS I've seen. Resource miser? Hmmm, I'd
:
: I work with SCO's putative "Unix" (Linux is FAR more compatible) every day.
: Linux is positively TINY compared to SCO. As for other operating systems:
:
I switched to Linux from SVR4. Linux is MICROSCOPIC compared to SVR4. My
Linux kernel is 260KB (I compiled out math emulation, networking, all the
stuff I don't use). I couldn't get the SVR4 kernel below 1.1MB. I couldn't
believe all the stuff they put in that thing. And for what? Linux has
just about every SVR4 feature I care about (long filenames, symbolic links,
procfs, etc.)!
The thing is, the Linux implementation is often superior. Linux's procfs
wipes the floor with the SVR4 implementation -- all SVR4 had in /proc was
a single memory image file for each process. Linux's C library (thanks, HJ)
is GNaturally superior;) SVR4's BSD emulation was a buggy joke -- some of the
string routines were broken! SVR4 had no MS-DOS filesystem. The asy (serial)
driver was damn near useless -- I couldn't get decent mouse response in
X-Windows until I got a PD replacement. Arrow keys were unreliable in vi
under X. Unix domain sockets were broken in a way that caused the pre-
XFree86 server to hog the CPU. Need I go on?
Linux just works, and yes, it *is* small considering what you get.
:
: Brandon S. Allbery bsa@kf8nh.wariat.org
: