Re: [Gnewsense-dev] The Linux kernel, no longer as monolithic as it once was?

[Travis King]

On Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:29:45 +0930
Kim Hawtin <address@hidden> wrote:

> [..snip..]
>
> Linux on the other hand, was driven more by being able to support the 
> available hardware, but had one key difference. The X Windows System
> was a completely separate project and pushed in different direction
> to the kernel team. That changed a while back, but kernel support for
> video devices didn't seem to be such big deal, although theres been
> plenty of discussion in that space. Its also been the leading example
> where many kernel folks use X as the ideal user space service idea
> for drivers. Around 2004 there was a push to make lots more hardware
> drives user space applications/services. That way the kernel could be
> smaller and more general purpose, rather than having many very
> different non interoperable interfaces.

How did that effort turn out, if you know? It sounds like one of those
deals where the kernel could comply with the GPL while also doing a
run-around as to enable usage of non-free blobs like nVidia's
X11 driver.

> For example in FreeBSD you had all sorts of different low level
> devices, char streams, several block devices, different types of
> memory devices, etc, etc. At some point they made everything a
> stream. How has that worked out? Well, it was generally slow at
> first, but its fast now... arguably faster than Linux in some regards.

Did this occur during the major 5.x development?


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