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Robert Love, Preemptible Kernel Maintainer Interviewed
Tom F writes: "LinuxDevices did an interesting interview with Robert Love, the maintainer of the Linux preemptible kernel along with MontaVista. It is an exciting read and has Robert's usual wit and insight."
Instead of making their own forks, Love, Cox and Torvalds *MUST* compromise, unless they want to doom Linux to the same marginalisation that BSD suffered due to excessive politics and infighting. Corporations are already being frightened away from Linux due to the diversity of distributions available; if this excessive diversity were to spread down to the very core of the operating system, the kernel, maintaining commercial software would exceed being just difficult and become almost impossible. We can't let this happen, or else Microsoft will eat us for lunch.
Where do these college students get all this time to hack on the kernel? Don't they have to study at all?
Obviously, you want someone that knows the kernel really well and can maintain every part of it.
That person doesn't exist, not even Linus knows every part of the kernel inside and out.
You have to trust the maintainers of their parts of the kernel because as good as Linus, Marcelo, Alan, etc are they can't know all the gotchas, etc of all the drivers and different kernel subsystems.
Aren't you taking a good developer (who can maintain every part of the kernel) away from the newer versions of the kernel?
They don't have to do it if they don't want to or don't have the time. But with Alan's recent want to not maintain 2.4.x so he can work on other things seems to say how much time is really required for the maintenance of a kernel tree.
There are only so many developers, what happens if you run out?
I highly doubt there will ever be that many currently maintained kernel versions.
If you maintain different kernels, people say "OHMYGOD we are forking we will all DIE"
If you roll changes into a kernel and make it unstable, people say "OHMYGOD production kernel's not stable we will all DIE"
RTFA and lighten up. The patches are being considered for 2.5. They haven't been ruled out.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Remember when you had to compile your device drivers into the kernel yourself instead of using a module? The idea here is that the vital OS features are part of the kernel.
The open source movement is about modifying your software and sharing it. Anyone with the ability can modify a vital OS feature and share it. voila! Many, many kernels.
But, the problem here is that real time processing does not belong in a macrokernel architechture. Look at the commercial RTOS (Real Time Operating Systems) like QNX and you will see that a microkernel architechture -- a kernel that a provides minimal feature set is favored. This is because if you are depending on time constraints, all you want in your kernel is message passing and task syncronization.
I'm supposed to be working right now.
While there are different Linux distributions, these all use the same kernel and the same applications, usually built from the same sources. A Redhat binary will generally run fine on Mandrake or Debian or Caldera or SuSE or what have you. FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD have become completely different operating systems with vastly different userspace code. Binaries are not at all portable between the operating systems. This is a far deeper and more severe fork than Linux, and if we continue down the road of having more and more Linux kernels (as we are seeing now), soon the same deep, irrevocable split could happen to Linux as well.
Aren't you taking a good developer (who can maintain every part of the kernel) away from the newer versions of the kernel?
Stability and code maintenance are just as important (or more important, in some cases) as new and exciting features. Work on older kernels isn't wasted -- any relevant fixes can be ported up to the devel version.