| <i>Ugh. The kernel includes the drivers either in the kernel image itself (hence monolithic) or (more likely these days) as modules, most of which are part of the vanilla kernel source. ANYONE who's ever compiled a kernel knows this, because it's right in the config menu — which drivers to include and which not, which should be part of the image and which should be modules</i> Right I'll go tell NVidia/ATI to shut down their driver department and dust out my 15 year old dot-matrix printer. And please note, this is not from the perspective of the Chrome OS but from the point of kernel including all the drivers which it honestly cannot. There are a LOT of hardware devices/printers whatever. If the kernel included drivers for ALL the hardware available out there (how about the zillions of cheap chinese devices) then I think it would be bloated even more than Windows! What I do accept is that the kernel does include generic drivers for essential hardware (VGA or generic video drivers, k/b, monitor, mouse/touchpad etc) <i>it may be possible at some point in the future to write a good image editor for the web using HTML5 canvas.</i> Sigh.. That was just an example. There are a lot other tasks that users expect out of a even a basic system that say windows/linux netbooks CAN do that chrome (from what information is available) will not be able to. <i>They said the Linux kernel (which apparently includes more than you thought it does). They didn't say only the linux kernel. I imagine glibc (or eglibc) stays. In fact, I suspect most of the GNU devland libraries will be present, if to be used only by OS developers and not by app developers.</i> From the official announcement:
<quote>The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.</quote> The announcement clearly states: The basis is clearly the kernel. Assuming it as targeted at consumers, I doubt glibc or the various compilers or development libraries never to be used by the consumers will be included.
And the last sentence, The platform for app developers is the web. It is not targeted at OS or app developers so it would not make sense to include those libraries. |
2. You keep assuming that because they say the linux kernel they mean only the linux kernel. You mentioned printing — why do you think CUPS won't be present? Also, I didn't say app developers would use glibc, but the chromium port will use it.