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Kernel Changes Draw Concern
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "Is the Linux kernel becoming fat and unstable? Computer Associates seems to think so. Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates, said the kernel is 'getting fatter. We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel. We are interested in a more stable kernel.' There continues to be a huge debate over what technology to fold into the Linux kernel, and Andrew Morton, the current maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, expands on these subjects in this article at eWeek."
I think it's laughable that Computer Associates talking about other people's bloated software.
The problem, I think, is that developers tend to be people who love computers. And people who love computers tend to have nice rigs, just as people who enjoy cars tend to spend a disproportionatly large amount of their income on cars (ever see the parking lot at a lan party--complete with people pulling multi-thousand dollar machines out of the hatch of a Hyundai?).
Perhaps Linux needs more developers from third world nations; the kid from a rural village with intermitant electricity getting his hands on an old, but useful machine and learning that he, too, can tell it to do all sorts of things!
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Which is exactly what Andrew Morton said. I think that the underlying issue is a human resources one. CA wants Linus and Andrew to spend all of their time working on "Enterprise" features and none of it on things like improving Linux's real-time performance and integrating drivers for non-server hardware. I think that they're being selfish and unreasonable, but that seems to be par for the course for CA.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
To further expand on this, if CA thinks the kernel is unstable because developers are working on game drivers instead of stability, then they should hire some developers themselves. Part of your contract with open source is that you can't tell a guy working for free that he is working on the wrong thing. If you want a certain feature, here is always a price. There are plenty of examples of open source developers being hired by employers to work on feature the employer is specifically interested in.
Spencer Ogden
Why must all criticism of anything open source must be labeled "bashing"? Every single time someone dares utter a single word of "dissention" about Linux or anything else, they must be "shills" spreading "FUD". Every single time. Hell, even when ESR rants about how CUPS sucks, he's branded a retard. A lot of things in free software suck to high heaven. Just like a lot of commercial software does. But the FOSS unwashed masses really need to get a grip. Not everything is perfect just because it comes with source and a bill of rights.
Have you ever installed a late version of Windows?
Watch the installer load device drivers for every known weird form of RAID before it even begins to ask you how you want to install the OS?
And then how long does it take to do "hardware detection" - versus Knoppix that does it all in the three minutes or so it takes to boot from CD?
Yes, Windows is bloated - bloated with (so-called) "features", not drivers. If Linux makes THAT mistake, we can complain. Having a bunch of drivers and support for oddball subsystems loaded into the kernel is not serious and until somebody DEMONSTRATES a stability problem, it's bullshit.
So far I've heard nobody say the 2.6 kernel is in FACT unstable because of x, y, z drivers or subsystems.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Menuconfig is just the window to the maze that is the kernel ifdefs. You have no idea of the size or speed impacts of the options you through if the help doesn't tell you. You have no idea of the component interactions.
Menuconfig is just a parking place for problems. The real problem is too many options, and not enough testing of the combinations. That is what CA is complaining about.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
I think people are missing the real issue in their anger over someone criticising the Holy of Holies. In case you missed it, the issue is that Linux is getting fat and bloated.
linux-2.6.11 is forty four megabytes. Gzipped up. I don't want to waste my bandwidth downloading it to see what it is unzipped, but trust me, it's massive. Where does all this bloat come from? Drivers. Drivers are good, but the current kernel paradigm (and Linux isn't alone in this) is that every driver has to be included with the kernel. So we end up with huge packages and huger repositories where everything is required to reside.
Imagine the size of Linux when we finally get to the goal of having every past and current device with a dedicated driver in the source tree. You're talking possibly ten gigabytes uncompressed. Even if you're not using 99.9% of those drivers, they're still there. The day may come when you can actually build the kernel faster than you can make its dependencies.
Could you imagine a KDE or GNOME where every core, addon, auxiliary and experimental component was all part of one single tarball? Even if you only wanted GTK+ and GIMP, you still have to download and configure the entirety of the GNOME repository to get it. That's what it's like with the Linux kernel.
It's time non-core drivers got split off from the main Linux project. If you don't need to add anything into the kernel to get driver to work, then put it in the driver subproject and don't bug the big guys with this penny ante crap.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
But how about sharing it with a multinational company that is able to throw massive resources into helping you to develop your program? If you shut out all companies you shut out the freeloaders, but you also shut out companies that would otherwise be helping your project. The Linux kernel isn't mostly the work of hobbyists, and it hasn't been for a long time. For many years Linus worked for Transmeta, who hired him in part because they wanted to use Linux with their chips, and now he works for OSDL, which is funded by big corporate Linux users. Alan Cox works for Red Hat. Marcello Tostatti works for Conectiva (now Mandriva or whatever they're calling it). The list goes on and on.
And then there are the direct corporate code contributions. SGI has contributed XFS and a lot of work on NUMA. IBM has contributed a boatload of code including JFS, NUMA, and RCU, and they've tried to contribut more things that were eventually passed up because others came up with better solutions. Namesys developed ReiserFS. Many vendors have contributed drivers for their hardware. The Linux kernel wouldn't be nearly what it is today if those companies hadn't been contributing.
The key thing to understand is that freeloaders don't actually cost anything, except for the bandwidth they use for downloads, but contributors help to build the software. It's smart to let anyone use the software because then anyone can be a contributor. Help from the IBMs and Red Hats of the corporate world more than pays for all the freeloaders.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.