It's human nature to tool worship. I am no exception. But please, let's worship tools that enable radical innovation. The Linux kernel was that tool--in 1999. It's still improving, but it's not worthy of this much attention. It merely allows existing innovation to work better. It's like celebrating the latest Xeon processor--cool, yes, but not worth this much collective distraction.
There are plenty of small, toy-level kernels out there for people to cut their teeth on. Linux used to be this way, now it's more grown up. There's nothing wrong with that, no reason people have to specifically target the Linux kernel.
With Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and lots of other tinkerer platforms out there, the rising generation should have more opportunity than ever to experiment and learn about hardware and make meaningful open-source contributions.
While keeping the codebase of any project simple enough that a novice can pick it up with minimal difficulty is a great ideal, the real world generally limits that and forces some ugly/unpleasant complexity into place.
I'm one of those people who think OS kernels should stay as portable and simple as possible (i.e. C89 or some other easily-bootstrappable language, to avoid Ken Thompson attacks), so this isn't great news to see "the ladder being pulled up another rung". Then again, Linux has already become immensely complex.
That's not really relevant when talking about the linux kernel, though, is it ? There's tons and tons of open-source code that could just run clang-analyze today and eliminate swathes of memory bugs.
I don't think you understand the scope of what you're talking about. Linux is tens of millions of lines of code, most of which is drivers that have to be written by vendors.
Vendors aren't going to write drivers for your hobby kernel. No one is using your hobby kernel. Bootstrapping a new kernel without billions of dollars to invest in development time is almost impossible, and anyone who is investing billions of dollars is likely going to have dubious proprietary reasons for doing so.
A successful kernel is Rust is probably the worst thing that could happen to the open source community.
There's nothing stopping anyone from forking the Linux kernel and adding their own advanced features if they think they're so valuable. Almost no one even uses a vanilla Linus kernel; distros all have their own custom kernels. So the fact that no one's bothered making a big competitor to Linus's kernel (which of course would mostly be a drop-in replacement) means that either no one thinks these things are useful, or no one's really competent enough to do it (and willing to spend the time/effort). As for filesystem advancements, they're working on btrfs; what more do you want?
For one this is old hat, from way back.
And you're right that you have no idea, because since then thousands of folks have cut their OS teeth on Linux kernel development. (I'm one of them).
The other part is significantly better hardware support (including powersaving and wider range of devices) which would also be completely undone by a unixy kernel.
I really kinda fail to see what would be gained by rewriting a piece of kernel that works just fine (well, except that ./ users would finally declare that they were right all along!)
Also my point is about Linux kernel, being as relevant as AT&T UNIX, after the generation that created it is no longer among us.
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