[ghshephard]

Something to meditate on any time there is an "Appeal to Expert" - particularly on an issue that is forward looking.

Also, I love how he was so confident with regards to

While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over.

[qznc]

The funny thing is that I would mostly agree with him. The important detail is "Among the people who actually design operating systems." Linus would agree that Linux is not designed. It evolved. Very few OSs are designed these days.

The QNX microkernel is quite successful. L4 also seems to do well. The BSD Mach microkernel is still around. Minix is still around, although its reliability approach (similar to Erlang, let processes/drivers fail and restart) does not gain mindshare. Windows is considered a hybrid since NT. Likewise XNU/Darwin is Apple's hybrid.

Maybe the current state is more like: Neither micro nor monolithic won, but we know the tradeoffs now and an OS designer can decide per feature. For most applications the difference does not matter, though. Most applications build on a higher level platform (JVM, iOS, Browser, etc).

[jacquesm]

Linux did not evolve so much as that it tried very hard to emulate Unix but outside of the *BSD world.

I think microkernels will have their day in some part of the future.

[Nux]

Also this (later in the thread), he was pretty wrong..

"Making software free, but only for folks with enough money to buy first class hardware (x86) is an interesting concept. Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."