Post #101,869
5/14/03 3:08:04 PM
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Re: Do you have a clue why Linux is easily ported?
The *methods* (memory management, file systems, networking..) are more or less standardized, as Linus himself said, here:
[link|http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html|http://www.oreilly.c...es/book/appa.html]
[link|http://www.forwiss.uni-passau.de/archive/linux/personen/interview.html|http://www.forwiss.u...en/interview.html]
[link|http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-03/lw-03-opensources.html|http://www.linuxworl...-opensources.html]
Quote:
"The Linux kernel isn't written to be portable to any architecture. I decided that if a target architecture is fundamentally sane enough, and follows some basic rules then Linux would fundamentally support that kind of model. For example, memory management can be very different from one machine to another. I read up on the 68K, the Sparc, the Alpha, and the PowerPC memory management documents, and found that while there are differences in the details, there was a lot in common in the use of paging, caching, and so on."
Exactly what I claimed.
-drl
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Post #101,878
5/14/03 3:40:41 PM
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No, that is not quite what you claimed
You claimed that portability is a moot point.
Which is obviously wrong, because plenty of people are out there demonstrating that portability is very far from moot.
What Linus knows is how to achieve portability. As happens with many well-designed solutions, what you have to do makes the problem so transparent, that it is easy to miss that anything was done.
See [link|http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20000501_65.html#5|this] for a longer explanation of how you achieve portability. Then re-read the page that you quoted from. That is what Linus is doing.
Just in case someone missed it, here is how it works. What you do is define a simplified idealized model. Program to that model. For each architecture, supply compatibility macros so that the ugly details of that architecture look like that model. Except in a general outline, the architectures need not work the same way. This approach allows you to hide that fact in a clean way, with the ugly details hidden away nicely in an unobtrusive fashion.
However if you attempted to do the same thing using a different design, then you would very quickly find out that the differences are not minor, and portability is very, very far from being a moot point.
Cheers,
Ben
"good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not"
- [link|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html|Stefano Mazzocchi]
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Post #101,881
5/14/03 3:46:51 PM
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Well, to me
-drl
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Post #101,882
5/14/03 3:51:32 PM
5/14/03 3:55:04 PM
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Well, to me "moot" means..
..solved. Something becomes moot once a way to solve the issue has occured. If you keep arguing when a valid solution is at hand, then the argument is not about the original issue. So any points you make are "moot" - it's argument for its own sake. Isn't that what the word means?
Let's see:
Usage Note: The adjective moot is originally a legal term going back to the mid-16th century. It derives from the noun moot, in its sense of a hypothetical case argued as an exercise by law students. Consequently, a moot question is one that is arguable or open to debate. But in the mid-19th century people also began to look at the hypothetical side of moot as its essential meaning, and they started to use the word to mean "of no significance or relevance." Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value. A number of critics have objected to this use, but 59 percent of the Usage Panel accepts it in the sentence The nominee himself chastised the White House for failing to do more to support him, but his concerns became moot when a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would oppose the nomination. When using moot one should be sure that the context makes clear which sense is meant.
Yep, that's what it means - argument for its own sake.
So, it turns out we agree, but you didn't understand what I was saying.
BTW I DO agree with everything you said in the above post. Not that it means anything to you.
(edit: KDE3's Klipper apparently has cut/paste issues.)
-drl
Edited by deSitter
May 14, 2003, 03:55:04 PM EDT
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Post #101,886
5/14/03 4:07:51 PM
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Why does your position appear to be shifting?
At first you argued that portability was a moot point because all hardware was pretty much the same.
Now you are arguing that it is a moot point because there is a known strategy for achieving it which works (if you have sufficient knowledge and discipline to apply it properly), despite the fact that the hardware is not really the same.
Other than the fact that you are drawing the same conclusion both times, the two arguments do not actually agree.
Regards,
Ben
"good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not"
- [link|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html|Stefano Mazzocchi]
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Post #101,888
5/14/03 4:30:05 PM
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Modus operandi
Hand-wave until someone calls you on it, then bullshit your way towards an "agreeable" position.
Regards,
-scott anderson
"Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
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Post #101,895
5/14/03 5:11:53 PM
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Re: Modus operandi
Tell me exactly what has shifted in my position between now and when I posted about it years ago. You can search Karsten's archives (I can't). You'll find a thread somewhere where 1) pointed out the Linuxworld article 2) waxed ecstatic that someone knew what he was doing 3) generated a similar flamewar, most likely.
-drl
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Post #101,892
5/14/03 4:56:07 PM
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Re: Why does your position appear to be shifting?
Not at all. My position is exactly as quoted by Linus, in the LinuxWorld article, and in the exchange with the useless academic Tanenbaum, because when I read those back when, they made a large impression on me. He basically made a theory of portability and then implemented it - just as you said. All the talk of portability after this is moot - because it was based on wrong assumptions. "Moot" - for the sake of argument alone, because the reality is otherwise.
Whatever, in any case.
-drl
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