Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. Linux kernel developers Peter MacDonald, David S. Miller and Theodore Ts'o also joined the debate. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war. While the debate initially started out as relatively moderate, with both parties involved making only banal statements about kernel design, it grew progressively more
Operating system connected to, providing commands to and/or receiving data from the device, and on the other end, the requisite interfaces to the operating system and software applications. It is a specialized hardware-dependent computer program which is also operating system specific that enables another program, typically an operating system or applications software package or computer program running under the operating system kernel, to interact transparently with a hardware device, and usually provides the requisite interrupt handling necessary for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interfacing needs. The key design goal of device drivers is abstraction. Every model of hardware (even within the same