Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds & Linux Dev Process
sebFlyte writes "Builder UK is reporting that Linus Torvalds is concerned that the Linux production kernel maintainence process might be overly taxing Andrew Morton, saying: "One issue is that I actually worry that Andrew will at some point be where I was a couple of years ago -- overworked and stressed out by just tons and tons of patches. If Andrew burns out, we'll all suffer hugely." Morton himself wants to make -mm releases more often. He sees bugs as more of a problem, rather than patches themselves. His solution is simple: "I'd like to release -mm's more often and I'd like -mm to have less of a wild-and-crappy reputation. Both of these would happen if originators were to test their stuff more carefully.""
There doesn't seem to be much happening out there wrt 2.6.15," said Morton in a mailing list posting. "We're at rc2 [the second release candidate of 2.6.14] and I only have only maybe 100 patches tagged for 2.6.15 at this time. The number of actual major features lined up for 2.6.15 looks relatively small too," he said in a later posting.
Ok, not that much going on w/this kernel, and then we get:
In the same mailing list thread, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the maintainer of the development kernel, expressed concerns that the kernel development process may need to be changed to make sure that Morton is not overworked.
So, there isn't much traffic coming through and Morton wants to do even more -mm releases but Linus thinks he might become overworked? I'm confused. Any clarification on this from the list that the article doesn't give?
He suggested this may indicate that the kernel is nearing completion. "Famous last words, but the actual patch volume _has_ to drop off one day," said Morton. "We have to finish this thing one day."
I still haven't even bothered to move to 2.6.x as I have no reason to. I used to update my kernels immediately (and even ran various -AC, etc) but 2.4.x has been so stable for me that I see no reason to bother. Perhaps the reason why traffic is low is because of that?
Label this OT if you want, but a few mins ago /. had a story called "IT: Microsoft Windows is Officially Broken" - it appeared to have comments too, but when I went to read it, it was gone. Switch back to the front page; also gone. Hmmm...I'll post a screeny here: http://cryer.us/images/slash_story.png
fak3r.com
In the Pugs project, the coders and testers are generally different people, when the tests being written first.
I'm fairly ignorant about the kernel development process, so I ask: could automated testing play a greater role in the quality assurance of the project?
I read the article, and it's clearly some sort of shitty spam website to begin with. If you read through the entire article, you will find that there are 3 pages, with pages 2 and 3 being mostly the same thing regurgitated from the first page. On top of that, it's clear that they didn't run the article through a spell checker, and the grammar is clearly not right in several places. It's a reseller site or some shit like that, and it looks like one of those news aggregator websites that appears legit to Google's search engine, but in reality is just there to try and generate some ad-click revenues for the spammers running it. Guess the slashdot "editors" got wise to the spammer/submitter's tricks and yanked the article for once.
Now if only they would do that for all the Roland Piquepalle "articles"...
"I was trying to point out that 'point of failure' is just inappropriate whan applied to humans, as it is very rare that it would be unrecoverable at all."
Damn! Einstein got hit by a bus.
Is it me or has kernel 2.6 been comparibly unstable and quirky in the past six months? I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this instability and wish that the Linux developers would move back again to their old even-stable and odd-testing version numbering. Things did seem to be a lot more stable back then when this old versioning scheme was used. I mean really, for the past few months kernel quirks in 2.6 have made the kernel appear more like a testing kernel than anything. I am thoroughly disappointed.
I know that people will complain that I have not cited anything specific or tangible; that is fine. The point for me is that I am sick of random spurious issues that seem to be fixed in one release and then some new permutation thereof appears later. Candidly a lot of these things have to do with CPU throttling, power management, USB, and other aspects of the kernel.
While I appreciate how much Linux's hardware support has increased over the past few months, the desire for a more mature environment has left me wanting something more.
In all seriousness, if the quirks of kernel 2.6 keep persisting, I might be inclined to migrate to, god-forbid, BSD.
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
As someone who uses unit testing for application development, I'd have to wonder whether the cost of setting up such a system would be worth the benefits? One of the big challenges in automated testing is measuring behaviour to check correctness.
How do you check that a kernel driver is using hardware correctly? It's more or less difficult to measure the beavhiour externally depending on the system. Effectively you need to use mock/simulated interfaces -- in this case probably virtual machines -- but then what kind of code coverage would you get?
Personally, for the kernel, I'd guess the bang-for-buck of adding static checking would be higher than dynamic checking.
Microsoft Windows Is Offically Broken
David Richards & WSJ - Monday, 26 September 2005
From: http://www.smartofficenews.com.au/Computing/Platfo rms_And_Applications?article=/Computing/Platforms% 20And%20Applications/News/E5T7U6H8&page=1
Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.
Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. "It's not going to work," he told Gates in the chairman's office, the paper reports. "[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. "The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin's warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.
Microsoft's Jim Allchin
Accordingly, according to the Journal, Microsoft then went down the Linux path of first developing a solid kernel for what's now called Vista. It is now adding the features it wants, one by one. Gates was eager for his programmers to add a fundamental change to Windows called WinFS that would let PC users search and organise information better. WinFS was so troublesome that engineers began talking about whether they could make the "pig fly". Images of pigs with wings started appearing in presentations and offices.
The Journal says the Longhorn crisis helps explain the sweeping restructuring that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced last week, splitting the company into three major business units. The goal is to force Microsoft to be more nimble in producing and delivering software. The result: Microsoft has thrown out years of computer code in Longhorn and started out with a fresh base. It has now set up computers to reject bug-laden code automatically. The new Vista will be simple. Bells and whistles will hopefully come later - including WinFS.
According to the WSJ, Gates resisted at first, pushing for Mr. Allchin's group to take more time until everything worked. Over the next few months, Mr. Allchin and his deputies would also face protests from programmers who complained he was trying to impose bureaucracy and rob Microsoft of its creativity.
"There was some angst by everybody," says Mr. Gates of the period. "It's obviously my role to ask people, 'Hey, let's not throw things out we shouldn't throw out. Let's keep things in that we can keep in.' "
Ultimately, Mr. Allchin's warning proved cathartic and led to what he and others call a transformation in Microsoft's most important product. A key reason: the growing threat from rivals such as Google Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and makers of the free Linux operating system. In recent years these companies have been dashing out some software innovations faster than Microsoft. Google has grown particularly effective at introducing new programs such as email and instant messaging over the Internet, watching how they perform and regularly replacing them with improved versions.
Microsoft's Windows can't entirely replicate that approach, since the software is by its nature a massive program overseeing all of a computer's functions. But Microsoft is now racing to move in that direction: developing a solid core for Windows onto which new features can be adde
fak3r.com
.. it should be far easier for branches/nodes of the linux kernel codebase to cross-polinate.
.config/Makefile hegemony, i think we'd be seeing a whole lot more public, broader testing going on. its only because i can't confirm/share system .config databases with my peers that it makes it so hard to test other peoples patches; this could just as easily become a 'namespace' manipulated through existing tools ..
.configs from .torrent servers[or whatever]' as part of the -basic- Makefile in the kernel releases.. yes, svn&co. have their 'namespaces', but i'm talking about 'make update_patches -server:blahblah.org' as a commonly accepted means of contributing to the patch-sphere.
the -mm releases are definitely a high order, public priority; but the broader picture is that there are as many possible permutations of linux code as there are tarballs being globbed.
i see the taxing of andrew (and linus before) as more of an issue of broken tools. if the linux kernel codebase had tools integrated into the core Makefile which would allow for easier tree/pruning/updates and public server integration as the most -common- interface to the
i mean, there are too many ways to get yourself a copy of the kernel, maneuver the patch universe (why haven't patch namespaces become another NS record type yet, i wonder..?), find bits you want to test, etc.
i imagine a broader 'namespace of patches, and public tested
which is, actually, huge.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Can search/browse tons of source code by function calls, class hierarchy, method definitions, comments, macros, etc. It recognizes language syntax, and should be useful for Linux development.
Well NetBSD is finally becoming stable but its a tiny obscure OS that is still years behind Linux in terms of SMP. FreeBSD is not stable anymore and I have not heard of anyone running mysql in a production environment that has gotten it to run reliably. OpenBSD is a nitch and is not smp ready.
You may want to try Solarisx86
I am about ready to make the jump. And Because Sun has paid for the patent rights to use proper fonts it looks alot better than Linux.
http://saveie6.com/
If it is testing, why does the Wikipedia refer to it as stable?
v ersion_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel#Stable_
The Linux kernel has not been quirky for me.Perhaps you should file a bug report, if you haven't already. FreeBSD 5.3 supposedly has stability problems of its own.
1 518217
9 .html
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/
Also according to Coverity source code analysis tools, Linux has less bugs detected per lines of code than FreeBSD. Ofcourse, this cannot detect every kind of bug, but it cannot be argued by a logical person that because FreeBSD has more bugs per lines of code, it is actually more stable.
http://www.coverity.com/news/news_06_27_05_story_
That's reasonable for some very high level subsystems in the kernel. For most things, such as drivers, the scheduler, etc, it's probably not.
Sometimes defining "pass" and "fail" is hard enough, with tuning efforts. Then there's cleanups. On top of that there are fixes to obsure drivers for hardware that nobody on LKML actually has.
I'm all for unit test based development, but there are some levels where it's practical, and some where I don't think it is. An OS kernel is to an extent the impractical side. I do like the idea of unit-tests from userspace to make sure nothing userspace-visible breaks, though.
- it's when some £$^$%^^%%$ checks in broken code, or forgets to check something in, that you want to go and wring their bloody neck, because you're pissing your sunday away trying to fix the weekly rollup build.
This is why I love products that protect the source tip with pre-commit testing. If it doesn't pass the regression suite, it's their problem and not your problem. You can do it with commit hooks in some CM tools (Subversion gives you some ability to do this, as an example), and there are a few commercial tools that give you a LOT of control over the commit test.
Disclaimer: In addition to being a very satisfied customer of Calavista, I help them out on occasional contract work, so I have some interest in their success.
Regards,
Ross
Maybe somebody could arrange for Morton & Torvalds to get a personal secretary. It can just be some CS student that gets some kind of work experience credits or some shit :)