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According to Linus, Linux Is "Bloated"

Posted by timothy on from the he-was-there-when-it-happened dept.

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.

3 of 639 comments (clear)

  1. A Few More Bits of His Talk by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I can't believe I'm relying on The Register for this but they have a few more quotes from him:

    Uh, I'd love to say we have a plan. I mean, sometimes it's a bit sad that we are definitely not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel that I envisioned 15 years ago...The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean, there is no question about that. And whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse.

    And also:

    He maintains, however, that stability is not a problem. "I think we've been pretty stable," he said. "We are finding the bugs as fast as we're adding them -- even though we're adding more code." Bottomley took this to mean that Torvalds views that the current level of integration acceptable under those terms. But Mr. Linux corrected him. "No. I'm not saying that," Torvalds answered. "Acceptable and avoidable are two different things. It's unacceptable but it's also probably unavoidable."

    I think that's very important to note. His quote by itself is very self-loathing but to add that tit's unavoidable really says a lot. You want to be popular? You have to satisfy more people and in doing so you become more bloated. He does maintain that Linux remains stable and that's usually the biggest problem I have with bloat. It decreases stability. I don't think there's any reason to get excited about level headed rational and reflection.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. Re:Problem by jhol13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Constant changes, i.e. lack of stable KBI (kernel binary interface) does not help.

    Eventually keeping your incompatible stack is easier than keeping up-to-date with latest and "greatest", especially if you happen to test your code.

  3. Re:Problem by oiron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It gets done because ultimately somebody says "Fuck this, I can't work on this bloated codebase any longer. We're refactoring, guys!"

    Then, if the old lead dev / maintainer / admin doesn't like it, a fork happens...

    Projects where this has happened before: The kernel itself, several times (as well as various subsystems, again several times), X (XFree to XOrg), KDE (2-3, 3-4), Amarok (1.x to 2.x), SodiPodi -> Inkscape, Firefox from 2 to 3... These are off the top of my mind, of course - there are lots more.

    Of course, there are some cases where this process has failed. I don't think the failure rate is any higher (or lower) than proprietary projects, though...

    The incentives are different, but they exist, nevertheless...