Rumpkernel comments by Linus

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

Linus seems to frown on the rumpkernel efforts since he believes it'll put 
the OS into a straight jacket (my words, not his). The original post is 
below. However, what say you folks? Is he reacting to something he doesn't 
know anything about based on his general instincts or is he making a 
legitimate critique? Is it a value-system judgment or is he missing some 
fact about the AnyKernel approach that negates his preconceptions? Is it 
simply a case that Linux already gets lots of DriverLove[tm] from the 
vendors and they just don't have to care or is that too cynical?

-Swift


---[ Slashdot Snippet ]---
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-linus-torvalds-answers-your-question

"anykernel"-style portable drivers?
by staalmannen

What do you think about the "anykernel" concept (invented by another Finn 
btw) used in NetBSD? Basically, they have modularized the code so that a 
driver can be built either in a monolithic kernel or for user space 
without source code changes ( rumpkernel.org ). The drivers are highly 
portable and used in Genode os (L4 type kernels), minix etc... Would this 
be possible or desirable for Linux? Apparently there is one attempt called 
"libos"...

Linus: So I have bad experiences with "portable" drivers. Writing drivers 
to some common environment tends to force some ridiculously nasty 
impedance matching abstractions that just get in the way and make things 
really hard to read and modify. It gets particularly nasty when everybody 
ends up having complicated - and differently so - driver subsystems to 
handle a lot of commonalities for a certain class of drivers (say a 
network driver, or a USB driver), and the different operating systems 
really have very different approaches and locking rules etc.

I haven't seen anykernel drivers, but from past experience my reaction to 
"portable device drivers" is to run away, screaming like little girl. As 
they say in Swedish "Brnt barn luktar illa".