Doing it better 1999-08-02 e
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> > Another point: people will be interested in a cut down Linux distribution
> > as a base for other OSes. Especially if we do the work necessary to
> > provide the same abstraction layer for a Java style piggy-back OS on top
> > of Windows, Mac OS and a full Linux. I think the ability to run our stuff
> > stand-alone or piggy-back is really nice, especially for development, and
> > we should publish that part as a separate product.
>
> This sort of thing has already been done, e.g. OSKit runs Kaffe, there's a
> cut-down Linux (~10Mb) which runs gforth and a few things to make
> networking plausible; there're also lots of "Linux on a floppy" distribs
> plus things like PicoBSD (the core of FreeBSD, which uses ficl in the
> bootloader). Although I'm not sure it's been done well yet, it should have
> been by the time we're anywhere near, so we should be taking advantage of
> it rather than rolling our own.

We should certainly be looking there instead in that case. I want all
peripherals, networking, booting, and one application. Find me the best
solution.

> One of the nice things about Tau is that to get anywhere we absolutely
> have to keep it clean and simple. Complexity to gain performance simply
> isn't an issue (with the exception of a few areas we're interested in,
> like code generation).

I presume that is an objection to the stand-alone/piggy-back dichotomy. I
think a piggy-back option is much simpler to write than a stand-alone one,
and that it will be very useful during development. I think that a
stand-alone option is necessary for people with less powerful hardware,
but will never achieve market penetration on its own. The complexity is
minimal, as it only affects things below the HAL.

Alistair