Argh, it is horrible when you have to explain jokes.
Matthew Garrett (mjg59 on HN) is a well known Linux developer. [1] He has a real talent for discovering and fixing weird, _weird_, problems with hardware firmwares, especially issues related to ACPI and UEFI. Have a look at his Linux.conf.au 2014 talk [2] to understand the kind of weirdness we are talking about (You will want to cry and laugh at the same time).
Before becoming a kernel hacker, Matthew Garrett earned a PhD in genetics studying fruit flies.
Now this project is very cool, both from the programming point of view and from the fruit fly point of view. Hence the fear that Garrett may abandon his spectacular work on the Linux kernel to go back to his original academic interests.
Oh thank you for the context; i've misunderstood what you have said than; i thought you were joking about a "fruit fly kernel" not being a proper kernel to replace the linux kernel, with some sarcasm added to it
The term is actually used in the sense of an OS kernel; just as Linux, Darwin, etc. provide services required by software applications written for those platforms, so too does NK aim to provide those services required to construct and execute models of the fly brain on GPUs.
Yes, i agree with you this can be a proper OS kernel too; i've misundestood the OP statement because i didnt know the real context of what hi was implying; my bad.
This is actually, probably a good step into what a "OS" kernel will look like in a not-far-away future
Maybe we should blame the GPU folks for switching from "shader " to "kernel" for general computing shaders instead?