Re: Nobody should ever need to patch the kernel!!

440gtx@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
It is strange to me because layered drivers have been essential in
other operating systems for the last 20 years or so. Even Dos was
actually nice in that regard and everyone had their favorite cool
tsr's.

Most computer people who are old enough to remember TSR's do not care
to remember, let alone discuss them. This is even more pathetic than
harping about some old girlfriend that left you 20 years ago.

For the benefits of the younger newsgroup readers, TSR's were
interrupt-time hacks which rudely patched themselves into the interrupt
vector (due to the system having no security whasoever) and peeked at
undocumented memory locations in DOS to determine whether it was safe
to call into it from interrupt time. They were not "layered drivers",
nor anything "in that regard", and were far from "cool". Stupid, more
like. I used DOS, but didn't run a single TSR, ever. Nobody in their
right mind ran these programs, which compromised whatever stability the
system might have had. TSR's were so flaky that the order in which they
were loaded affected stability due to "conflicts".

The TSR technique was widely used by virus writers; quite likely, the
majority of TSR's were in fact viruses rather than useful programs. A
virus, embedded into an infected executable, might install a part of
itself in memory which would stay there after the termination of that
host program, triggered by interrupts or possibly other operating
system dispatch hooks.

The linux model really strangles creative products.

Take it to comp.os.*.advocacy, and take that "angryatlinux" dummy with
you.

Linux has nothing to do with why your lives turned out the way they
have.

If you don't like how it works, don't use it. It's still possible to
ignore Linux, and make a living doing something in computing, even
software development. That is, if you actually have real skills outside
of trolling.

Linux has never needed washed-up, wannabe kooks who can't fit into the
computing sphere, though it has attracted them en masse. They typically
become pissed off and bitter when the openness of Linux doesn't
magically fix their career problems.

.

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