Torvalds Bemoans Size of RC7 For Linux Kernel 3.5

alphadogg writes "A host of small modifications and a large number of system-on-a-chip and PowerPC fixes inflated the size of release candidate No. 7 for Version 3.5 of the Linux kernel, according to curator Linus Torvalds' RC7 announcement, made on Saturday. Torvalds wasn't happy with the extensive changes, most of which he said he received Friday and Saturday, saying 'not cool, guys' in the announcement. However, the occasionally combustible kernel curator didn't appear to view this as a major setback. 'Now, admittedly, most of this is pretty small. The loadavg calculation fix patch is pretty big, but quite a lot of that is added comments,' he wrote, referring to the subroutine that measures system workload."

Comments

wow

[masternerdguy]

Linus is getting bitchy lately.

Re:wow

[PreparationH67]

Eh, at bit. But I will defend his ripping into the opensuse devs about using the root password for everything until my last breath.

Re:wow

[Trashcan Romeo]

There are few things more painful than a swollen kernel.

Re:wow

[morcego]

Linus is getting bitchy lately.

Yeah, and RMS was talking non-sense yesterday. What is the world coming to ...

Re:wow

[osu-neko]

I think the point is not so much the swelling but the fact that this is a huge bunch of stuff to be thrown in during an RC cycle, between rc6 and rc7. You're not really supposed to be doing anything major to a release candidate...

Re:wow

[morcego]

Yeah, and RMS was talking non-sense yesterday. What is the world coming to ...

Yesterday? I'm a big fan of RMS - since before the beard - but the day he doesn't talk non-sense will be news.

Exactly my point. Just like the day Linus doesn't get bitchy :)

Geez, I figured we were all past the <sarcasm> tag already.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus has always been bitchy.
It is why Linux is the way it is now.

If it wasn't for his bitchiness, it would be Windows. Yes, I am not kidding.
There'd be ENTERPRIIIISE CODING brilliance in there, AKA useless bloat for stuff nobody should EVER, IN THE HISTORY OF EVER, have access to, and countless other things. (up YOURS Microsoft! )
What's that, writing a driver are you? If it isn't fully descriptive in code, you're fired!
What's that? You saved a huge number of cycles by using a Goto there? FIRED, we want more lines! (I'm not even kidding, Linus had to defend a Goto in a driver-level file, this is how mad this anti-Goto retardedness is these days, kids man)
So on and so fourth.

Hey, at least he isn't a Ballmer. Nobody can beat ol' monkey boy.
Developers developers developers deve... oh go away developers we don't want you in Windows 8 anym... no sorry we were just kidding! ... honest!
Linus is always solid.
Without him, Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it. You don't want that now, do you?

Re:wow

[Tough Love]

There are few things more painful than a swollen kernel.

It's nothing an antibiosic shot wouldn't fix.

Re:wow

[TheInternetGuy]

Geez, I figured we were all past the <sarcasm> tag already.

</sarcasm>
Ah, there, that's better...
If you don't close your sarcasm tags, my sarcasm parser will get messed up and my whole day gets very confusing.

Why is this a story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus bitches and moans about the size of every release candidate. Better that broken stuff gets fixed now rather than with an ever-lengthenng string of point releases after the fact.

Re:Why is this a story?

[vlm]

Linus bitches and moans about the size of every release candidate. Better that broken stuff gets fixed now rather than with an ever-lengthenng string of point releases after the fact.

The kernel's always pushed the limits of memory, compilers... Here's a typical example from a little over 20 years ago from usenet

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Help, can't compile 0.95a!
Date: 3 Apr 92 21:27:41 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article wjb@cogsci.cog.jhu.edu
(Bill Bogstad) writes:
>
> I have a 8 Meg system and also am having problems compiling fork.c.
>I would have thought that would have been sufficient....

Ok, the problem isn't memory: it's gcc-1.40. For some strange reason
the older gcc runs out of registers when optimizing some of the files in
the linux source distribution, and dies. This one isn't the same bug as
the "unknown insn" which was due to my hacks in the earlier 1.40 - this
one seems to be a genuine gcc bug.

Linux 0.95a is compileable with the older gcc if you just add the flag
"-fcombine-regs" to the command line. In fact, the only thing you need
to do is to remove a "#" from the makefiles: the line

#GCC_OPT = -fcombine-regs

should be uncommented, and gcc-1.40 will have no problems compiling the
source. This was documented in some of the release-notes for 0.95, but
I guess I forgot it for 0.95a.

Why remove the flag in the first place I hear you say? Simply because
gcc-2 doesn't understand -fcombine-regs, as it seems to do the
optimizations even without asking. There are other things I had to
change in the source to get gcc-2 to compile it, but this is the only
problem that made the old gcc choke.

With the advent of an official gcc-2.1 (this weekend?), people might
want to change to that one: note however that gcc-2.1 is about twice as
big as 1.40, so it's going to be slower on machines that swap... People
with just 2M of mem might not want to upgrade (*). I like the changes
to 2.1: the code quality seems to be a lot better (esp floating point).

On a slightly related note: the as-binary in newgcc has been reported by
several people to have problems. Getting as from the original
gcc-distribution by me (gccbin.tar.Z) might be a good idea if you have
problems with the newgcc version.

                Linus

(*) Even with only 2M of mem, using gcc-2 has it's good points. The
shared libraries should cut down on memory use as well as loading time
and disk-space use. Shared libraries work even with 1.40 if you know how
to build them, but 2.1 does it all automatically...

Re:Why is this a story?

[JimCanuck]

Are you sure you belong on /. ?

There are floppy disk Linux distributions. There has been for quite some time. Last I checked a floppy disk is only 1.44MB.

Let alone in 1992, a 8MB RAM system was on the higher end of a typical desktop.

Hold on a second.

[Millennium]

If I'm reading the article correctly, this isn't so much about file size as about the number of bugs fixed. Or rather, how many bugs still needed fixing in what was supposed to be the seventh release candidate of the kernel: something one would not expect to find so many bugs in very quickly.

Is this the case?

Re:Hold on a second.

[dacut]

In the actual e-mail, it's about both size and change velocity:

Because I last week I thought that making an -rc7 was not necessarily realy required, except perhaps mainly to check the late printk changes. But then today and yesterday, I got a ton of small pull requests, and now I find myself releasing an -rc7 that is actually bigger than rc6 was.

Re:Hold on a second.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus is mainly complaining because he wants bugfixes to come in during the merge window. The RC's are then used to iron out bugs that got added by features that were added during the merge window OR to fix existing bugs that were too invasive to fix in a normal 3.x.x update. The idea is that the change from 3.4 to 3.5-rc1 is massive, 3.5rc-1 to 3.5rc2 is smaller, 3.5rc2 to rc3 is even smaller. And it keeps getting smaller until the number of commits is very low, and those commits are very small changes themselves. This SHOULD have been 3.5 release, but instead a ton of large commits were done after rc6 and that makes Linus uncomfortable about labeling 3.5 as Stable until people have a change to test out those new commits. The more commits people do past like rc2, the longer the delay until 3.5 is marked as stable and released, honestly unless im forgetting something, I havent seen a 7th release candidate for any kernel since the change to 3.0, most of them have been capping around 5. By a 7th RC there shouldnt be really anything going on unless an email comes in that is labeled "URGENT KERNEL PANIC FIX" and from the sounds of it...none of these were that, and could have all been saved for the merge window for 3.6. Instead we have the 3.5 kernel delayed by another week.

Re:Hold on a second.

[dkleinsc]

It seems like part of what he's trying to point out here is that there may be developers trying to cram in what are really new features into 3.5 by declaring them bugs and pushing them into RC's, rather than waiting until the next release. This behavior wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Re:Hold on a second.

[Cyrano de Maniac]

The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.

My sympathy is miniscule -- if RC-appropriate changes are what he wants then he should reject/postpone the changes in question as falling outside RC criteria instead of kvetching about them. It's a self-made and self-perpetuated problem; developers will abuse largesse only as long as they are allowed to.

Re:Hold on a second.

[Kjella]

The way to achieve what you say Linus wants is for him to reject/postpone changes that fall outside RC criteria. "Sorry, the train has left the station. There's another one due to leave at 3.6." When developers learn that the development phase criteria are enforced they will adjust their behavior to fall in line, but contrapositively they will not adjust their behavior if the criteria are not enforced.

He does. All the time. And people try bending the rules and stretching the definitions. All the time. You make it sound like Linus only had to tell them once and everybody'd go "well alright then" but it's more like a horny teenager with a girl on the back row of the cinema. No matter how many times those hands are pushed back they'll be back in a slightly different way or after another round of sweet talk. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about or what this "girl" thing is, you can imagine it's like the lobbyists in politics. No matter how many times a bill is defeated they'll keep pushing for new laws that amount to the same. In all three cases they just don't quit until they succeed.

WHO HE THINKS HE IS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell this Linus thinks he is by criticizing Linux development??!111?

Linus Says Something

[mwolfe38]

"Not cool guys." - linus OHMYGHOSH, front page news.

Re:Negative coding

[swillden]

Sounds like the kernel could use a good refactoring.

Because too many people contributed too many patches during a window in the development cycle when not many (or large) patches should be contributed?

Umm... I think you didn't understand what the problem is here. It's a violation of development process protocol that has nothing to do with the quality of the code. Someone trying to submit refactoring patches would have made it much worse, not better. Actually, it wouldn't have been worse, because Linus would just have rejected them at this point in time.

Re:Negative coding

[busyqth]

Sounds like the kernel could use a good refactoring.

Let's recode the whole thing, and this time, we'll do it RIGHT!

Re:Negative coding

[sconeu]

The HURD guys would like a word with you...