[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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