On OS reliability

[Jan Panteltje]

Recently Prof. Tanenbaum introduced his new OS 'Minix 3'.

http://programm.froscon.org/2008/events/278.en.html

Now one should note that this comes from the man who once (1992) claimed;
'Linux is obsolete', but... after that Linux took a big flight.
http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/mhonarc-files/obsolete/msg00000.html

Anyways,
In Minix-3, that has only 5000 lines of kernel code,
drivers run in user space, and if applications crash, then they are
'revived' by a 'reincarnation server', and nobody
notices that it crashed (was rotten in the first place?)

So, been thinking about this, 16 years, 365 days a year, 5000 lines,
makes about 0.85 lines of code per day.

 

[Frank Buss]

So, been thinking about this, 16 years, 365 days a year, 5000 lines,
makes about 0.85 lines of code per day.

I assume he used maybe 1/10 of his time to write the code. And then I
assume he rewrote it multiple times, because if you write some complicated
software like an OS and applications for it, you'll get new ideas how to
improve it, which could require a rewrite of the core.

It is easy to write Microsoft Vista with 50 million lines of code, but a
well designed system with 5000 lines is difficult