From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2009-06-09T18:45:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby OS

2009/6/9 Sparky Mat <max@sparkymat.net>:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>
>> However, there's a reason why Linux and BSDs have bazzilions of
>> drivers that took years to develop and debug and half of them are
>> still failing half of the time. There's simply way too much different
>> hardware which is either not documented or has undocumented bugs so
>> you will have hard time if you try to run on bare metal and support
>> any hardware but the main memory.
>>
>> Exotic microkernels won't help you either because they suffer from the
>> same basic problem: they don't have drivers for most hardware so the
>> chance you can boot anything based on them on your machine is pretty
>> small.
>>
>
> I agree with most of what you've said, and yes, I don't want to spend
> the next few years writing/re-writing drivers just to get stuff working.
> I had already shelved my Minix setup yesterday and am now setting up a
> RubyVM on Linux kernel. Well, starting with a default Debian
> installation and stripping out stuff now.


Note that on Linux many drivers (filesystem, USB, parallel, ...) can
be written in userspace so you can still use any language you like for
these. Hopefully the number of subsystems that are open in this way
will increase over time.

Thanks

Michal