"On February 8, a terse announcement to the LKML list
stated: "A quick note to tell anybody interested that zeta-0.1 is
out. It may be of interest for those who are trying to understand
the kernel internals, and don't want to bother big kernel guys.
Best wishes, Thomas." Curious? We were. What we found is an
interesting education exercise that perfectly illustrates the
"itch-scratching" principle at work in the Open Source development
community.
When Linus Torvalds posted to the comp.os.minux newsgroups on
August 25, 1991, he said of his new creation Linux: "It is NOT
portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will
support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have."
Yet today, Linux has been ported to nearly every platform: ARM,
SPARC, MIPS, IBM 370/390, embedded processors, Motorola and Compaq
chips, RISC, AS/400, Beowulf clusters, and so on.
It appears Linus was wrong. So what's an industrious would-be
kernel hacker to do? Engineer a totally new architecture just to be
able to port Linux to it? Not practical. So Thomas Capricelli did
the next best thing: He created a virtual platform called Zeta. Now
he's working on porting the Linux kernel to it. Why? Because he
wants to dig into the kernel internals. "Porting Linux to a new
platform has always been one of my dreams," he writes at the
project Web site."
