[linux-elitists] How to kill Linux

[Mike MacCana]

Greg KH wrote:

>On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 05:49:58PM -0500, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
>  
>
>>"The idea here would be to cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it 
>>to Linux directly. This would become MS-Linux. If Microsoft actually produced 
>>an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of 
>>Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their 
>>peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market.
>>    
>>
>
>Heh, no one must have told him that Linux does PnP just fine, as well as
>supporting more devices than Windows does :)
>  
>
Indeed.

A test:
- Install dual boot Windows XP SP2 and Fedora.
- Remove hard disk.
- Insert into different machine and boot.

XP: about four reboots, and 20 minutes.
FC: none. Kernel loads the modules, Kudzu does the configuration.

>>That means tearing away the entire top of Linux from the driver layer-and that 
>>would be MS-Linux. Users who needed to add the driver layers would be offered 
>>the standard Linux driver package, which would be attached with a utility 
>>program. The utility would sew the drivers back into Linux, resulting in an 
>>OS that would be more or less the same as everyone else's."
>>    
>>
>
>Ah, like the current driver thunking layer
><http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/> that allows you to do just this
>today?  For free?  
>
Or Captive NTFS. Or the USB thing I heard someone was developing a while 
back.
The NT kernel API is pretty small and seems to be quite possible to 
implement reliably.

Mike

>I don't see Linux disappearing anytime soon because
>this layer already exists.  What I do see is lots of Windows drivers
>blowing up the whole system as they try to do horrible things (huge
>stack allocations, etc.)
>
>Although it is quite nice to see that in some people's eyes, drivers are
>the most important thing in an OS.
>
>thanks,
>
>greg k-h
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>