Re: x15 (was: The next step of GNU in pure technical perspective)

[Kete]

On 2014-12-12 18:54, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 06:10:26PM -0500, Kete wrote:
>
> > Smartphone users would benefit from this x15
>
> Why smartphones in particular?...
>
> -antrik-

First, I want to repeat what RMS said about the modem that makes the 
actual telephone calls. There is no free software for this, and it would 
require reverse engineering.

Aside from that, smartphones need microkernels for many reasons.

* much less code taking up crucial space on the device
* Things that should be in user mode are highly vulnerable in the 
Android kernel space.
* Android Linux upgrades take a long time to download.
* Hardware vendors do not run their drivers through the Linux community, 
so current drivers do not get updated for subsequent kernels.
* Vulnerabilities are much easier to spot and patch in 100,000 lines of 
code than 14,000,000.