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.""
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?
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?
It was a dupe of this. Wait a minute...a dupe has been pulled on Slashdot! And there was much rejoicing....yay.
Perhaps Linux needs to switch to a more Windows like development process:)
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.
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
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]
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?
Of course, this may explain France's military record.
Melt in your code not in your hand...