From the article: "but Firecracker's implementation had two bugs: It placed the MPTable in the wrong place (above the advertised top of system memory rather than in the last kB) and it set a field containing the number of table entries to zero rather than the appropriate count. In both cases, Linux accepts the broken behaviour; so I added a "bug for bug compatibility" option to the FreeBSD MPTable code."
I'm pretty sure that discoveries like these is why it's good to have operating system diversity. Conversely, sometimes I do wonder if having everyone on the same OS would allow us to have way more cool things and still have less bugs. But it doesn't matter too much because it'll never happen...
> But it doesn't matter too much because it'll never happen...
I'm not saying you're wrong or right, but it's worth remembering that it's hard to guess how it'll be in the future. Maybe Apple acquires Microsoft at one point (or vice-versa) and eventually ends up buying Linux (somehow, don't ask me how), and we'll end up with one OS for absolutely everything. Weirder stuff have happened.
There used to be multiple contenders for what would end up as "the internet", with many countries having their own versions. I'm sure at that point some people had similar sentiments running through their heads, something like "wow, wouldn't it be cool if all these various networks was just one instead? But that'll never happen..."
Similarly how we today look at messaging services not being interoperable with each other, but seems this is slowly (veeery slowly) changing.
I'm pretty sure that discoveries like these is why it's good to have operating system diversity. Conversely, sometimes I do wonder if having everyone on the same OS would allow us to have way more cool things and still have less bugs. But it doesn't matter too much because it'll never happen...