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Fwd: Dishonest, stupid, or deluded... pick one :-)



>From: Stefan Savage <savage@cs.washington.edu>
>To: uw-systems <uw-systems@cs.washington.edu>
>Subject: Dishonest, stupid, or deluded... pick one :-)
>Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:50:15 -0800
>X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0)
>
>This is an excerpt from a chapter about the history of the linux kernel by
>Linus Torvalds.  It is published in a new book, "Open Sources: Voices from
>the Open Source Revolution" from O'Reilly & Associates.
>
>"Speed matters a lot in a real-world operating system, and so a lot of the
>research dollars at the time were spent on examining optimization for
>microkernels to make it so they could run as fast as a normal kernel. The
>funny thing is if you actually read those papers, you find that, while the
>researchers were applying their optimizational tricks on a microkernel, in
>fact those same tricks could just as easily be applied to traditional
>kernels to accelerate their execution. 
>In fact, this made me think that the microkernel approach was essentially a
>dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't
>necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they
>were simply stupid. Or deluded. I mean this in a very real sense. The
>dishonesty comes from the intense pressure in the research community at that
>time to pursue the microkernel topic. In a computer science research lab,
>you were studying microkernels or you weren't studying kernels at all. So
>everyone was pressured into this dishonesty, even the people designing
>Windows NT. While the NT team knew the final result wouldn't approach a
>microkernel, they knew they had to pay lip service to the idea. "
>