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How Google Uses Linux
postfail writes 'lwn.net coverage of the 2009 Linux Kernel Summit includes a recap of a presentation by Google engineers on how they use Linux. According to the article, a team of 30 Google engineers is rebasing to the mainline kernel every 17 months, presently carrying 1208 patches to 2.6.26 and inserting almost 300,000 lines of code; roughly 25% of those patches are backports of newer features.'
I. Want. This.
This company had about a million servers last time I cared to find out. I dont think 'more cheap hardware' means the same thing to you as it does to Google.
"His name was James Damore."
This is something I have been wondering too. Doesn't it just lead to applications crashing more often than them normally reporting they cannot allocate more memory?
They are already running absolutely absurd amounts of cheap hardware. "Just buying more" is something that I'm sure they are already doing all the time but clearly that only goes so far.
I suspect the answer to that is a very very small number.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You are clearly not an engineer of scientist. Aside from the fact that some people just like to solve technical problems, I am betting google's logic goes something like this:
We have a problem that is basically only costing us $0.01*10,000computers/day. While that seems low, we plan on staying in business a long time, we could pay someone to solve the problem. Then there is that X factor, that if you don't do it, if you stop innovating, your competitors will, and they will get more and you will get less from the pool of money that is out there. In addition to that, the CS guy you paid to solve that is now worth more to your company (if you employed him) because [s]he now has a better understanding of a complex bit of code (the linux kernel) that you rely on heavily.
Does Google give any code and patches back to the Linux kernel maintainers? Since they probably only use it internally and never distribute anything they are not required to by the GPL, but it would still be the right thing to do.
Funnily enough the roads were there before the cars.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Ooooh... efficiency.. I'm curious what the net savings is.. compared to buying more cheap hardware.
We're talking about Google here. They have dozens of datacenters all over the globe, filled with hundreds of thousands of servers. Some estimate even a million servers or more.
So lets assume they have indeed a million servers and they need 5% more efficiency out of their server farms. Following your logic, it would be better to add 50,000 (!) cheap servers which consume space, power and require cooling and maintenance, but I'll bet you paying a handful of engineers to tweak your software is *a lot* cheaper. Especially since Google isn't "a project" or something. They're here for the long run. They're here to stay and in order to make that happen, they need to get the most from their platform as possible.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Hmm, you realize that Android alone is over 10 million lines of code right? That's a pretty big open source contribution right there. But then there's also over a million lines of code across 100+ smaller projects too. So I am not sure what your definition of "table scraps" is but it's significantly more lines of code than most companies do.
Also consider the fact that Google has been basically deploying new servers non-stop for many many years. They are already purchasing cheap hardware at a very high rate. Even a tiny 1% improvement in efficiency for the existing and future servers is a huge huge win for them.
That could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars saved over the next decade, and it doesnt take a genius to realize that a couple dozen programmer salaries will be a hell of a lot less than that.
"His name was James Damore."
Porting patches from one kernel version to another is not innovation.
A while back I got an invitation to work for Google as a kernel developer. I declined to interview, because I already had a job doing just that. This article makes me glad I never accepted that offer. I feel sorry for those kernel developers at Google. Porting all that code back-and-forth over and over again. Now *that's* a crappy job.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Yeah great work Linus.
The distros STILL stick with older versions and backport fixes, because who in their right mind is going to bump a kernel version in the middle of a support cycle? It's even MORE broken because the kernel devs rarely identify security fixes as such, and often don't understand the security implications of a fix, so they don't always get backported as they should.
The Linux dev model is NOT something to be proud of.
Indeed:
"The Linux dev model is the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
... Oh wait, no. That was me, actually.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Back in the 90's, we had a customized patch to Apache to make it forward tickets within our intranet as supplied by our (also customized) Kerberos libraries for our (also customized) build of Lynx. It all had to do with a very robust system for managing customer contacts that ran with virtually no maintenance from 1999 to 2007--and I was the only person who understood it because I wrote it as the SA--when it was scrapped for a "modern" and "supportable" solution that (of course) requires a dozen full-time developers and crashes all the time.
Not really bitching too much, because that platform was a product of the go-go 90's, and IT doctrine has changed for the better. No way should a product be out there with all your customer information that only one person understands. But it was a sweet solution that did its job and did its job well for a LONG time. Better living through the UNIX way of doing things!
But, anyway, I never bothered to contribute any of the patches from that back to the Apache tree (or the other trees) because they really only made sense in that particular context and as a group. If you weren't doing EXACTLY what we were doing, there was no point in the patches, and NOBODY was doing exactly what we were doing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Sun has contributed to open source. Of course, slashdot appears to be perversely against Sun for some reason I cannot fathom.
Names are very important. The name Sun reminds of that place on the other side of the door where if we go, our skin gets red and burns. Google reminds us of that friendly homepage that would load under 5 seconds on dial-up.