Subj : Re: life, then end and everything
To   : Lawrence Garvin
From : Michele Debandi
Date : Sun Jun 29 2003 12:03 pm

Lawrence Garvin scrisse a Francois Thunus :

 FT> As for IBM putting AIX code in Linux, I personnally doubt it. The
 FT> two systems have rather different underlying philosophies as far
 FT> as design goes.

 LG> I agree with you Francois. I find it highly unlikely that there's any
 LG> code leaking from the AIX (written for the PowerPC) group down to the
 LG> Linux (written for the Intel Pentium) group. Even IF it was shared, at
 LG> best it would have been shared only conceptually, because the code
 LG> would have, most likely, needed to be rewritten for the differing
 LG> processor architecture.

Linux runs on PPC machines and even on most RS/6000 systems. But the
differences between Linux and AIX are anyway quite big. AIX is microkernel
based, while Linux is monolytic. AIX is quite particular respect other
unix: for instance has two superusers: root and console, with different
permissions, disk handling is quite strange and so on.

Major work done by IBM on linux kernel is on port it to s/390 system,
some device drivers and JFS (used in AIX, but born under OS/2).
And writing a device diver is not a thing you can have a lot of 
choices: you have to follow the guidelines of the IC maker, or
else nothing works.

Mike



.... MultiMail, the new multi-platform, multi-format offline reader!
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.43
 * Origin: Murphy BBS +39-11-7491411 +39-11-7719135 (2:334/403)

.