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.
"Okay, so the summary of this is that you expect that 12 per cent to be back to where it should be next year, and you expect someone else to come up with a plan to do it," joked Bottomley. "That's open source."
That is also the problem. Everyone adds pieces and eventually it starts to become a mess. Then someone else should fix it.
is finally having the last laugh? /dnrtfa
However, Minix continues to maintain its girlish figure.
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.
What "bloat" in software means to LT as the high priest of the kernel and what bloat means to me as a user are two different things.
To a user, bloat means awkward, slow, inefficient, and needlessly large (if my storage space or bandwidth is limited). But these are all *perceived*. I don't perceive Linux to be bloated.
In fact, I find *NIX with almost any window manager to be the most efficient computer OS I have ever used. Linux is the best of them, despite being a clone of the UNIX userland.
If an OS can boot from a floppy or small USB key and be totally usable, it is certainly not bloatware. Rewrite the Linux userland in MONO or Java and then we'll talk about bloat.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
This is like the salesman's nightmare, where you take the guy from engineering to visit the customer. Things are going great, the engineer can answer all the customer's questions.
Then you realize, *the stupid bastard is answering the questions honestly*.
Honesty is a basic requirement to be a halfway decent engineer. Persistent and incurable dissatisfaction with how you did the last job is another. Even if you *know* you did a great job, deep inside part of you knows you could have done it *better*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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...
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.