this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I'm not sure how you'd handle hardware in hardware.
Microcode is usually only run on the CPU, so in that case the implementation would be called "drivers". If you ran it on the device it would be called "firmware" and the OS still has to know how it address its interfaces somehow, and implementation is again called a "driver".
I mean some kind of unified interface spec and the hardware conforms to it?
Because when there's a new hardware function, the driver has to add support for it.