Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share
by H8crilA on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @02:52AM
(#36677296)
Let's remember that until fairly recently the Windows kernel supported only one architecture, lol.
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share
by scrlk on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @03:11AM
(#36677450)
It was designed for portability from the beginning and was ported to x86:
> Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases.
> In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system, due to developers being used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.
Re:After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share
by phendrenad2 on Sunday July 16, 2023 @07:39PM
(#36752513)
* * *
Linux has the largest collection of various hardware drivers, and a rather wide community of kernel developers who know how to produce them.
Linux has a number of specialty filesystems, some pretty important for embedded development.
Linux kernel has real-time extensions, which is not entirely a commodity, AFAICT.
Also, stuff like io_uring, BPF VM inside the kernel, namespaces (see "containers"), etc.
No, I don't think you can easily replace Linux kernel with whatever BSD kernel, Darwin, VxWorks, Contiki, FreeRTOS, etc, or, well, Windows. Much of the larger embedded stuff is Linux-specific, and much of big server stuff is either Linux-only or has extensive specific support.