Slashdot Mirror
According to Linus, Linux Is "Bloated"
mjasay writes "Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a somewhat surprising comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: 'Linux is bloated.' While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds." TuxRadar provides a small capsule of his remarks as well, as does The Register.
Keeping the bloat out is not just about rejecting patches, it's about encouraging code reuse. In the BSD kernels, for example, the WiFi drivers are very small and all use the same code for everything that is not hardware-specific. I believe this is the case in Linux now, but for a while Intel had their own (almost) complete WiFi stack for their drivers and no one else used any of that code. This is a pretty endemic problem in Linux. It gets even worse when you stray a little way from x86, and find that everyone is implementing their own, incompatible, code for platform-specific features without realising that a lot of it ought to be shared everywhere above the very lowest layer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most drivers are compiled as kernel modules and loaded only when needed.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Drivers live in the kernel tree. They don't necessarily have to be built into the kernel... Take a look at what the M key does in make menuconfig sometime...
Problem is the "bloat" is in code only not in the running kernel.
I can easily compile a linux kernel that runs in very little space on a super slow processor and it screams.
Problem is the "bloat" that Linus is talking about is simply plain old kludgy coding done to get it out the door faster. Adding features need to stop and all kernel coders need to work on cleaning things up. It's the sucky part of the job that nobody wants to do, but it needs to be done. I've seen the insides of some kernel modules that will make your toes curl in fear as they are early prototypes pre-alphas at best.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes.
QNX compared to a hand tuned embedded linux install is in fact Slow.
QNX on the other hand is a faster deploy time, you dont have to spend time wrapping your own embedded distro for your product, just pay the QNX license fee and you're off.
Back 4 years ago I proved that by making my own linux install for a company product and kicked out the QNX system. It ran far faster, but they did not want to pay to support the custom OS so we stuck with QNX, and they already paid for the QNX licensing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.