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by RedNifre 4159 days ago
How feasible is it to radically refactor an operating system? Would it be possible to gradually incorporate all the insights of operating system research into Linux/BSD/$otherProductionReadyOS or is it always necessary to start again from scratch?
2 comments
justincormack 4159 days ago
Minix3 is to a fairly large extent a refactor of NetBSD to have a microkernel base; osx kind of did a similar thing with freebsd. Also there are ways of running old OSs on top eg Linux on Genode.

NetBSD is a good starting point as the drivers are portable (via rump kernel; eg Genode uses this for their filesystem drivers) so you can reuse them in another OS as a starting point, plus it is reasonably simple as OSs go, plus the BSD license is friendly.

There were a bunch of related talks at https://operatingsystems.io/

link
Danieru 4159 days ago
Through refactoring Linux has been transformed to be a real time kernel using the linux-rt patch set. The patch set is aggressive and big and only slowly making way upstream.

Still it proves that yes, refactoring can work. Real-time is one of those super-duper invasive features. So if it works for real-time we should be able to refactor in other features.

link