Re: Grub

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> Otherwise, the GNU kernel would have had the much cuter and
> non-article-encumbered name "Alix", and might have taken off much
> earlier.  ;-)

Bother, we *did* have an Alix.  Back in the day, the original Hurd
design included a part which emulated the system calls.  That part was
going to be called "Alix", and RMS thought it made good sense to have
the Alix part specifically be that part which did the actual Unix
emulation itself.

But then more design happened, after names started to get fixed in
stone, and we discovered that a much cleaner design would be realized
by not having a separate alix, but rather folding that stuff into the
C library as ordinary function calls, and not having Unixoid syscalls
at all.

However, it is still a design goal to be able to run binaries that do
make such syscalls, and the emulation widget for that is still
expected to get called Alix.

Thomas