Even if he hadn’t conceived of Git, I can hardly see him going down in the history books as a “one hit wonder”. Maybe if he’d just conceived and programmed the early Linux kernels... but aside from Git, the work he’s put into architecting Linux and managing the enormous effort that goes into “managing the mainitainers” is simply breathtaking.
And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta.
And for the sake of not making this sound like hero worship, I still side with Tanenbaum when it comes to the monolithic kernel vs. micro-kernel debate...
EDIT: corrected nonsensical double mention of ‘microkernel’.
> And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta.
Not sure why this is always overlooked.
The real-time code translation approach where you have a cisc front end but the code executs on a risc core was immediately copied by Intel (and sued for that). Without that technology we would still be doing 200 mhz at 200 watt.
Back then Intel was stuck with a classic CISC architecture that did not scale well.
What transmeta did was to keep the x86 instruction set (CISC) but internally convert them to a simpler RISC-ish instruction set and run it in a much simpler and power effective RISC core.
Intel copied this idea which allowed P4 (maybe already PIII?) to make a giant performance leap. Nowadays all high performance CISC CPUs from AMD and Intel do this.
And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta.
And for the sake of not making this sound like hero worship, I still side with Tanenbaum when it comes to the monolithic kernel vs. micro-kernel debate...
EDIT: corrected nonsensical double mention of ‘microkernel’.