Another newbie Question

[mq1]

O.k I have been reading and learning about redhat linux 6.1 which I have installed on one of my machines and trying to understand basic and inner stuff.Well my question is in regards to microsoft windows and linux.I read that if you put all the drivers in the kernal that it was monolithic and if you didnt it was modular,so what is windows?and whats is a platform os?,and modular os as far as how the os work to the drivers and hardware?
Thanks ahead of time for any responses .mike

[Statica]

Hi mq1:
In answer to your questions, the biggest advantage of the linux kernel was to ability to use modules that basically can be used on a need basis keeping your OS nice and light. In essence, windows is more of a modular monolith.
Even though most of the threading and the driver calls are essentially external in the form of dll's et al, its monolithic because it insists on loading EVERYTHING up. When I mean everything I do mean everything including the kitchen sink. For example, on the one hand, if you put in a NIC on a linux system, it would load up modules for the chipset not of the manufacturer, the revision date on the ROM etc, this creates an efficiency in design. Windoze on the other hand, especially when you cannot pinpoint the h/w specifics loads up pretty much every failsafe driver of that manufacturer. As you can well imagine the load on the system is tremendous. For example, have windows log bootup, C:\bootlog.txt and you should see the laughable system calls it makes.

A platform OS is basically an OS created for a very very specific platform, these are frequently in our current usage of the term representative of scaled down, OS on a chip type of OS. Again Windoze could be called an x86 specific platform OS, but more specifically, the examples might be something like WinCE or Palm OS.

HTH

[mq1]

Thats exactly what I needed.Thanks mike