At Netflix, we log JSON entries and scrape the logs to upload to our data base.... Simple syslogd can work, but I've often seen other packets layered upon its simple protocol...

To be fair, the earliest versions of Linux's PC Card support did likewise. Like the BSDs, the initial drivers were network or serial that were hacks on existing drivers that "reached over" and configured the PCIC so the device could probe. Those hacks were later replaced with better code that allowed for a wider array of drivers, as well as allowing them to come and go. The first hacks for hot-plug PCI also followed a similar trajectory: some hack to let people boot with the hardware in place, either in the driver itself, or in the bridges, followed months or years later by proper hot-plug support. USB was similar, but plug and unplug were well-trodden paths by the time it came along, so there was no lag...

 

Much the same way that FreeBSD has gone: to move away form the hand-tweaked config tables with lots of ifdefs in v7 to having each driver self contained with an init function that registers other interesting things and a way to add to the tree dynamically after boot. But maybe I'm biased, though it is approximately the model that Linux's device discovery evolved into after trying a couple of different strategies out first...

But there's many things that v7 never had to deal with: multiple CPU (everybody did that differently), dynamic devices, thousands of different devices supported by hundreds of drivers (it supports like 10 or 15 major ones), cope with large memory systems, deal with devices that had widely varying performance (all disks were the same: you submitted the request and tens of milliseconds later you got the results: no imbalances if you had a system with both NVMe with microsecond response time and tens of thousands of queue entires along with spinning rust with 10ms response time and maybe a few dozen). v7 didn't have to cope with devices that were very smart, so it didn't have to deal with dynamically balancing system resources to cope. It didn't have to deal with demand paging, or pages of different sizes. It didn't have to cope with cache coherency issues. It didn't even bother with shared libraries, nor did it require a MMU, though there were performance and security benefits. Oh, and it didn't deal with security very well by today's standards.

Even so, the code is very simple to read and understand. And now that's it's available, it makes so many other decisions and design patterns make so much more sense than even finely written prose describing them. The simple elegance of its ideas and implementation afforded a clarity of design that allowed one to see the basics and hold it all in your head with not too much study. The same cannot be said for any modern OS.

Warner