The first systems to be designed for robustness (and have it in practice) were opposite of Linus's approach to doing things. There's some similarities on occasion, which mainly shows talent learned through trial and error. The proven principles for highly reliable and secure OS's aren't applied, though. This is intentional despite massive evidence to the contrary of his position.
Meanwhile, systems like THE (Dijkstra), Burroughs B5500, IBM System/38, GEMSOS (Schell), RC4000 (Hansen), MULTICS, KeyKOS (Bomberger et al), and VAX VMM Security Kernel (Karger/Lipner) showed how to design and implement systems with ultra-high reliability and/or security. These lessons were mostly ignored time and time again even when they could be applied. User-mode drivers and languages with pointer/buffer/stack protection would have by themselves prevented ridiculous amounts of problems. I heard that, after around 2-3 decades, the UNIX crowd is adding some user-mode drivers. See the problem?
Note: Far as lightweight systems & adaptivity, you should see the work of Brinch Hansen, Niklaus Wirth, and Andy Tannenbaum. They applied safe, modular techniques on systems with less resources than today's. UNIX and Linus resist for both personal preference and inertia, not valid technical objections.
Meanwhile, systems like THE (Dijkstra), Burroughs B5500, IBM System/38, GEMSOS (Schell), RC4000 (Hansen), MULTICS, KeyKOS (Bomberger et al), and VAX VMM Security Kernel (Karger/Lipner) showed how to design and implement systems with ultra-high reliability and/or security. These lessons were mostly ignored time and time again even when they could be applied. User-mode drivers and languages with pointer/buffer/stack protection would have by themselves prevented ridiculous amounts of problems. I heard that, after around 2-3 decades, the UNIX crowd is adding some user-mode drivers. See the problem?
Note: Far as lightweight systems & adaptivity, you should see the work of Brinch Hansen, Niklaus Wirth, and Andy Tannenbaum. They applied safe, modular techniques on systems with less resources than today's. UNIX and Linus resist for both personal preference and inertia, not valid technical objections.