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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.""
What if he gets hit by a bus? What would happen then?
Is there a hierarchy of maintainers (like the succession to President) or what?
Seems to me they should have at least 2 people at that spot so its not completely a single point of failure.
I have to say that we in my lab are thrilled with the progress in the Linux kernel. We have been running Linux in our labs for ages, and it now controls the massive coils that circle all the corridors in our buildings, ominously humming in the night. Before, we had Windows XP controlling the titantic voltages that flow through the rings, and we found that very often the control threads would become scheduled into irrelevance and the voltages would become unstable. This would lead to devastating magnetic fields that would reverse the path of time across the carpet in my room, staining it really badly.
Shitram Brown, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
Don't be silly. That's what users are for.
At least, that seems to be the prevailing ideology the past 10 years or so.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
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
Add a requirement that each bug should have a failing unit test, that fails before the patch is applied and succeeds after the patch is applied.
This is an architectural problem, not a resource problem. There is no reason why the Linux kernel should require the baroque system of manual patches and updates that is currently in place. Instead, it should be composable at runtime out of many modules that are encapsulated enough and insulated enough from one another to be developed and updated independently.
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?
Perhaps Linux needs to switch to a more Windows like development process:)
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"...
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
Windows is broken
Like the first Windows
Bluescreen has spoken
Like the first crash.
Praise for the crashing,
Praise for the breaking,
Praise them for springing
fresh from install.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
.. 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. --
Linux Kernel Gets Fully Automated Test
n t
2.6 stabilization project (helped a lot during 2.5.x develpment AFAIK)
http://www.osdl.org/docs/stabilization_plan.curre
Well, here it is (odd second#) ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v1.1/v1.1.0. tar.bz2 for you to feel kewl and believe me, that it was still fresh in 94
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
ACPI has to be disabled, otherwise it will either freeze or spontaneously reboot. 2.6 will crash while loading modules related to USB, network (loading the 8139too module consistently crashes), agp and hotplug system detection. The install cds of Ubuntu and Suse are stable enough to install, but once installed to the hard drive, the system consistently hangs due either to one of the errors I've already mentioned; or for reasons I haven't tracked down yet.
[rant]
I'm not a kernel programmer; I just want a working desktop. KDE works on NetBSD (which automatically detects my sound card) so until the kernel people get their shit together; I'm done with Linux.
[/rant]
GIT is pretty much a fully-featured SCM by now. It still isn't fully stabilized and there is still plenty of things to work out, but it is completely practically usable, and it's actually from a large part designed to make things easy for the kernel people (well, especially Linus itself ;). I don't know if the workload is more or less than when using BK, and that would be actually a very interesting question to ask Linus, but I *think* things are easier for Linus now. I'm not really sure about Andrew Morton because AFAIK he is primarily a quilt user, permanently juggling hundreds of patches, and I don't know to how big degree did he ever use BK or git.
Regarding the strategic plan, I think Linus and most of the developers are happy with git now and don't plan to switch, and there are interfaces between git and some other systems (e.g. Merculiar (very popular between another significant proportion of kernel developers) and Monotone) that should enable you to seamlessly use those for your development.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
This was true in the past and technically, it is still true from some POV now, but in reality, what you now get as the git-core tarball from kernel.org definitely is a SCM system (with fairly crude interface, though, and I'd biasedly recommend Cogito for a nice interface to GIT ;-). GIT is indeed more general than that, and you do not necessarily have to use the SCM capabilities, but GIT _has_ those capabilities now, so it's probably less confusing if you make that clear as well.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
These wouldn't solve ALL problems, or even the majority of them, but they would solve some and they would make life easier on developers in the long-run. Are these being used? Well, a glance at the Freshmeat graphs for Web100 shows that it is getting downloaded. This doesn't mean it is getting used, though. The same is true of virtually all of the other code I've mentioned. People have copies, but if the code being submitted is flakey and taking a long time to fix, then maybe the code is not being used as much as it could/should be.
The tools exist, the tools exist on people's hard drives, but unless the tools are being used in practice, that's not going to do any good.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I believe the reason that LT discontinued the odd-even numbering was that the "development" kernels were under-tested and provided insufficient grounds for migrating the tree from development to stable.
Are you aware that the LKM team puts out a stable subversion of each release? I.E. 2.6.11 is released, then 2.6.11.1, 2.6.11.2, 2.6.11.3, etc?
Quality comes from design and implementation, not testing. Testing confirms that quality (or its lack). Testing is only one means of achieving that confirmation, and it's almost never the most effective of those means (assuming "effectiveness" is measured as number of defects removed per unit of effort expended).
Of course, this may explain France's military record.
Melt in your code not in your hand...
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_
Kernel Panic: Bus Error
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 :)