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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> I wish there was a nice wrapper dedicated to abstracting hardware support better so developers can focus on the interesting parts

The University of Utah had a research project back in the late 1990s which offered exactly that – the OSKit project [0]. A set of libraries for common (at the time) x86 hardware so OS developers and researchers could focus on what was original about their OS instead of writing yet another hard disk or Ethernet driver

Unfortunately, the research project ended circa 2000 and it is dead now. No support for contemporary devices like Wifi and USB. But, if you just want something to run in a VM (QEMU or VirtualBox or whatever) it probably still works.

[0] https://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/

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Today, when I build a custom Linux kernel, and am playing with config vars to decide what is our isn't included in the build, I very much tend to think of it as assembling a kernel from various library pieces.

How was OSkit different?

Linux isn't written with the use case of using bits of it in isolation in mind. Sure, you can do that, but the Linux developers don't have making that easy as a design goal, so it will often be quite hard, and even when it isn't so hard that is just an accident. By contrast, the OSKit developers had as an explicit design goal to make it easy to use bits of their code in isolation from the rest.

Linux gives no API stability guarantees for its internal APIs, only for the system call interface. By contrast, the OSKit developers intended the API of each component to be a stable documented interface. The Linux developers don't want Linux's internal APIs to be stable documented interfaces because that has a cost in that it slows down refactoring, which in turn reduces the various benefits that refactoring can produce (better performance, better maintainability, new features, etc)

> The Linux developers don't want Linux's internal APIs to be stable documented interfaces

It also has the "benefit" of making it extremely difficult to actually distribute stable device drivers that are closed source, or are simply not part of the actively-maintained kernel source tree.

A benefit that Android users enjoy by being always on the latest version.

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