[wellylug] Forking Linux.
Pete Black
pete at marchingcubes.com
Wed Nov 10 21:37:03 NZDT 2004
Enkidu wrote:
>On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 11:33:25 +1300, you wrote:
>
>
>>Yeah, I was confused about that. I assume he means creating a new
>>distro. People can get confused between Linux (the kernel) and
>>GNU/Linux (the kernel bundled with GNU utils+extras to make an OS).
>>Damn media.
>>
>>
>>
>No, actually I was thinking of the kernel.
>
>Is there any benefit in an optimised kernel for GUI, and an optimised
>kernel for textual things?
>
>Cheers,
>
>Cliff
>
>
>
>
Yes and no - You can optimise the kernel schedulers etc. to optimise
for typical GUI desktop application usage patterns - but generally this
is mostly optimising for low latency at the expense of sustained
throughput, and is as applicable to text-mode programs as graphical
ones. Whether you are a latency-sensitive sound engine such as ecasound
or Csound on the console, or xmms/mplayer on the desktop, latency
minimsation is equally important.
It would also be possible to put key components of the GUI into kernel
space to improve performance as with Windows's GUI, but this means
instability in the GUI can crash the kernel or compromise the security
of the system. If this architectural path were to have been chosen for
Linux, then perhaps a fork of the Linux kernel that did not include GUI
functions to improve security and stability would be a more attractive
proposition.
The kernel can already be tuned and optimised for various tasks -
however the distinction between TUI and GUI from a kernel point of view
is very small.
There is no difference from the OS's point of view between a process
that accesses the console via libc functions and a process that accesses
the graphics hardware via an XFree86/Xorg driver. This line is blurred
slightly when it comes to DRI/Nvidia drivers which have a kernel
component and are intended to bring application code 'as close as
possible ' to the hardware, but you can still have a functional GUI
without using 3D hardware, so this isn't really a TUI vs GUI issue.
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