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From: torvalds@cc.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ???
Date: 11 Aug 1994 12:49:04 +0300
Organization: University of Helsinki
Lines: 60
Message-ID: <32cs6g$l9t@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
References: <325760$rc9@ra.nrl.navy.mil> <Cu8CBr.Fx@calcite.rhyolite.com> <RSANDERS.94Aug9003813@hrothgar.mindspring.com> <CuA6w1.5tF@calcite.rhyolite.com>
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In article <CuA6w1.5tF@calcite.rhyolite.com>,
Vernon Schryver <vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com> wrote:
>
>There was an excuse for inception of Linux. Big-bad-nasty-mean-USL/AT&T
>is obviously a sufficent reason for most of the kernel. Who says
>otherwise?
Actually, USL/AT&T had little to do with the inception of linux at all,
other than being the original home of unix.. The discussion seems to
think that linux is "new" on the unix market, but linux has actually
been out there longer than the free 386bsd variants, and the major
reason I started on linux in the first place was that there was nothing
else available to me.
Admittedly, 386bsd was being worked on back when I started it, but I had
nothing more to go on than the articles in DDJ. The USL lawsuit came in
much later, and had no impact at all on the general kernel development:
there have been very few areas where it would have made sense to borrow
code from the other unixes (the migration has in most cases been in the
other direction - the BSD projects have found several linux subsystems
very interesting).
> For the network code, it is a weak excuse and I'm convinced
>that NIH was the real reason, but the excuse exists and may have been
>the entire reason for people working on network code who didn't know
>the business facts of the situation.
From a personal standpoint, I have to admit to being happy that linux
has its own networking: it has had some problems, but they haven't been
much worse than any other part of the kernel (they have /seemed/ a lot
worse, as the code gets compared to the other parts that had already
mostly stablized).
For some of the other developers, the USL lawsuit was one fear (even for
something like the CSLIP code which we *did* take from others). Another
argument was that the BSD mbufs don't make any sense these days where
memory is cheap (and caches makes pointer jumping look bad), and using
them would just be shooting oneself in the foot in the long run.
Naturally NIH has been a factor, but it hasn't been the only one, and
some of what you seem to call NIH is just a matter of deciding it's
easier to rewrite despite the problems. And it often is - the whole
linux kernel was started after 386bsd, but still was usable at an
earlier point (I'll ignore some of the reasons for 386bsd being late -
it's part of the same picture, IMHO).
>That fitting BSD code into a Linux might be hard is a crazy excuse. It
>makes just much sense as refusing to have an open() system call. Of
>course a non-BSD kernel has different internal mechanisms, but one
>expects a good clone (i.e. something strictly and unabigiously better
>than the original) to have compatibility glue.
Don't be silly. It's a clone on the *user* level, not internally.
Internally, it looks a *lot* different: mostly just because it has a
different history, partly because I think some "real Unix" ideas are
braindead ("spl-level" - ugh. Inherently stupid, and probably only done
because the original machines had priority-coded interrupts. Similarly
for disklabels.). And then we stole a lot of ideas from others too :-)
Linus