Abstraction (Was: Re: Potato->Woody)
Ok, ok, I'll bite.
In order to further my understanding of my place in the world (that is, ask
silly questions, see what happens), I feel the need to ask this (from
blissful ignorance, so be gentle).
Let us imagine an operating system that is built from a whole lot of
different modules that all talk to each other. Sounds a little like Linux -
no? So someone comes along and invents a new file system. The developer
community says "Cool" and life moves on.
The question is coming, be patient :-)
So in the scheme of things, some bright spark wrote the bit that speaks to
the disk drive - known as a driver. This person's goal in life is to make
their little driver be the fastest, bestest, smartest, tiniest piece of
code you can imagine. This is what they do in life, this is why they get
out of bed - you get the picture. Their driver takes all the hassle out of
writing bits to disk.
Question just over the horizon...
Then the inventor of the new file system just writes their little module,
so it talks to the disk-driver. So when someone else comes along and writes
a disk-driver for their blue-spangled-magneto-laser-disk thingy, the new
file system still talks to a disk-driver, and it all still works.
So, then someone asks, how come reiserfs doesn't work on sparc.
I wonder what am I missing?
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