17 Jan
2020
17 Jan
'20
9:23 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 09:50:24AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
6th Edition is clear and if you want to understand
what it takes and how it
works, John's commentary it difficult to beat.
It's a good starting point but it's pretty outdated. I like to go on and
on about how much I love the SunOS 4.x kernel but it is outdated as well.
I wish there was a v6/SunOS like kernel that was as clean but had good
support for SMP and NUMA and TCP offload (and probably a long list of
other useful stuff I've forgotten).
Teaching kids how a single threaded kernel works is cool but it's
also misleading, the world has gotten a lot more complex. And while
the kernels of decades ago were clean and simple, I don't know of
a kernel to point people to that has the clean code that SunOS had.
Solaris isn't it, though it has some bright spots. Linux is meh, it's
better than nothing by a lot but I would not point to it as "read this,
kid, you'll see the architecture". It's not clear there is a good
answer.