I had the thrill of a lifetime, hosting dinner for Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and David Cutler. Linus had never met Bill, and Dave had never met Linus. No major kernel decisions were made, but maybe next dinner ๐
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Yes, this is bullshit.
While some sort of a redesign of part of Linux's internals I could imagine.
In terms of kernel ABI stability Linux is often criticized even in comparison to BSDs.
And in general its insides are more messy and "naturally grown", or so I've heard (OpenBSD is the only OS whose internals I've made myself familiar with sufficiently ; also put some effort for FreeBSD).
So my, eh, alternative opinion would be that something is brewing for Linux like what Digital Unix was for BSD Unix. A hybrid cleaned up kernel, maybe support for different ABIs (like what exists in FreeBSD for Linux and older versions of itself, except maybe more ambitious). Maybe even tackling a more open alternative to NT (itself alternative to VMS and David Cutler being the man who did that) while they're at it. NT is not a bad thing. Even Windows is not a bad thing. Maybe Wine isn't enough, or maybe it would be cool to have something possible to make compatible with many Windows device drivers.
At least I hope it's Linux learning to do EEE and not the other way around.
Though with Bill Gates and Dave Cutler this really seems like a meeting of legends and nothing more. They're cool people, but I don't think they want to play global thermonuclear computing war at that age, unlike just global thermonuclear war IRL, this one is more attractive for younger people. Even if it's about some project being born, I'd expect that to be "just for fun" for everyone involved, they deserve that after all.