On Fri, 24 Apr 2020, Paul Amaranth wrote:
Much of the bloat is because of enormous amount of device drivers it
supports. Most of the drivers are just modules that one can safely remove
thus saving a lot of space but substantial support infrastructure is still
in the kernel in order for all those drivers to work.
All those "smaller and leaner" menuets or whatever are severely crippled and
only do a very small portion of what full-blown Linux kernel does. Then
there are many parts of actual OS that are simply not even thought of in all
those "little lean small gems" -- does it support USB3 and all USB devices
connected over USB2/3? All those media devices? Does it have something like
really big Firefox, not a rudimentary browser? SCSI devices? Wireless
connectivity? Bluetooth? And it goes on and on...
Another issue is vast collection of various libraries that allows Linux
programs to work in almost any distribution. Those "little gems" don't have
any so they only rung a couple of programs written specifically for them.
None of the programs written for other OS would run on those "liitle gems"
and none of those couple written for them would run on anything else.
All those "new game changing revolutionary" things are essentially useless.
They are limited to so some specific cases and almost none of those cases
justifies developing the entire OS for them. It is much easier to start with
something that already exist and trim it removing everything that you don't
need if you are short of space concentrating on developing particular user
applications instead of wasting time on re-inventing the wheel.
BTW, Windows CE was very nice, extremely lean, hard real-time OS supplied in
full source form so one could only pick whatever he needs for a particular
task and build a very small image from scratch. The resulting image easily
fits on a floppy with plenty of space left. Despite the "Windows" name it
has absolutely nothing in common with that monster; it is totally different
product. It is shame they killed it -- it was a separate developers' group
inside Microsoft that everybody else hated. I'm a hardcore Unix/Linux guy
who used Unix and programmed for it since its very beginning, before not
just Windows but even DOS was born but I do really like Windows CE that I
was lucky to discover when started hacking Flir Exx IR cameras -- they run
on i.MX25 under Windows CE 6 and both the MCU and OS are kinda forgotten and
unusual one. The i.MX25, despite its number, was released AFTER i.MX27 and
unlike the latter it is almost unknown...
There are a number of Linux distributions that could fit on a single floppy when those were common. The current kernel bloat is making it look more like Windows ...
On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 12:28:48PM -0700, medasaro wrote:
If you want to see how bad software bloat on modern operating systems really is (or conversely how fast modern PCs could be if anyone actually tried) check out MenuetOS. This is a project to do a proof-of-concept GUI OS written in x86/x64 asm. The whole thing fits on a single 1.44MB floppy, boots in seconds, and is a full-featured preemptive multitasking OS with a GUI, video player, web browser, etc. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
On the other hand, it drives me insane that at work we have these new MSO oscilloscopes from Tektronix that run Windows 7 on an embedded PC. The things have amazing sampling rate and sample depth plus lots of bells and whistled, but they... are... painfully... slow... to interact with. You press one of the buttons around the screen to bring up a menu and then wait for the better part of a second for it to respond. At home I have a TDS3034b with an internal M68K running Tek's own firmware. It responds pretty much instantly. Go figure. The old HP scopes were the same way - instant to respond to button presses. I just don't get it - why would anyone in their right mind WANT Windows on an oscilloscope? I don't want to have to run anti-virus on my scope. Or install windows updates. Or any of the other #$@%@#$^ that comes with maintaining a Windows install. And for what? So I can run Excel on the oscilloscope instead of my workstation? Actually, I would rather do my data proces!
sing on my workstation which has a larger, readable, screen, thank you.
-Matthew
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