Re: [Sheflug] RAID and kernel upgrading.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Will" == Will Newton <will [at] misconception.org.uk> writes:

    Will> On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> Not the Sparc ELC I happen to have.  Unless you call oopsing
    >> before starting /sbin/init "support."  If Red Hat pays people
    >> to work on

    Will> Did you report the oops on l-k?

A friend did, or said he would.  I don't read l-k.  He had a few
others he wanted to pass along he said.

    >> Sparcs, and gives them deadlines and puts priority on the ARCHs
    >> that big commercial users have lots of, what do you think
    >> happens to older, or less common, ARCHs?

    Will> Exactly what happened before commercialisation. Volunteer
    Will> support.

But not exactly the same volunteers.  The volunteers are off doing
something else.

    >> therefore the ones redirecting developer resources toward
    >> competing with Windows 9x and NT, 'cause that's where the money
    >> is.

    Will> Money is in competition? Sounds a little dubious. Obviously
    Will> Intel is the priority, most developers have an Intel
    Will> machine. It's as simple as that.

If it weren't in competition, why would everybody so hot for GUI stuff
like GNOME?  Why would distros brag about their no-brain-required
installers?  These are not a question of doing what Linux does well,
better.  These are a question of doing what Linux doesn't do well,
half-arsed.

Sure eventually it'll be as featureful as Windows 9x/NT, and surely
miles more stable.  In the meantime, if I wanted that kind of stuff,
I'd dual boot.  I know many many people who do exactly that.

    Will> But it isn't as if Alan Cox is the only man alive who can
    Will> help you.

Nor he is the only major developer getting his money from Bob Young;
Ulrich Drepper does too.  Linus isn't a grad student any more, he's
working for Transmeta.

The fact is, the pool of competent volunteers has dropped dramatically
in the last two years as they get employed doing what they love to do.

This is a GoodThang[tm].

What it ain't is "Exactly what happened before commercialisation."
Priorities have shifted drastically.  This may or may not be a
GoodThang[tm].

    Will> It's easy to generalize. Less easy to pinpoint problems so
    Will> they can be fixed.

Right.  Exactly why I want Linus, Alan, and Dave working on my Sparc
problems.  They have the knowledge and skills to deal with them; it
would take me three or four years to get up to speed, I suspect (my
day and well-into-the-evening job has nothing to do with programming,
let alone kernel hacking).

Again, they were volunteers; if they're happy with what they're doing,
what can I be but happy for them?  But it is changing the free
software ecology.  Too much fertilizer is a bad thing for crops, you know.
 
    >> Exactly my point.  Except that I noticed both the "very alpha"
    >> behavior and the "pre-*" version tags.  Doesn't that bother
    >> you?  It certainly would if it were a Microsoft product!

    Will> They ARE NOT general releases. They are available to use at
    Will> your own risk.

Just what a Microsoft spokesman would say.

C'mon, it's still the case that the code doesn't boot on many
platforms, and they're giving it a release RSN version number.  People
expect those -pre versions to result in a release within weeks.  I
don't think my Sparc or my friends' Alphas are going to work well even
if they boot 2.4.0.

    >> /sbin/init.  One suspects that what is happening is that people
    >> are

    Will> There has to be a lot of changes to support stuff like hot
    Will> plug for USB and to modularize code to make efficient reuse
    Will> across those subsystems.

Maybe.  The IrDA code went into 2.2 _at 2.2-pre4_.  Alan Cox wrote on
l-k "You may wonder why 50kB of code is going in in deep feature
freeze.  Well, that is because it has exactly three lines of impact on
preexisting code, two of which are `#ifdef CONFIG_IRDA' and `#endif'."

I doubt that "USB hot plug" costs much change in other subsystems, but
I'd be happy to be educated on why it does.  (Well, I guess if you
plug and play keyboards and mice, that doesn't seem to work in 2.2.
So maybe there would be pretty broad impact in console drivers to
support that capability for USB.)

    >> [1] No, I haven't filed a bug report; others have---Sparc ELC
    >> support has been non-existent for a couple of years.

    Will> Sounds like an interesting project for someone with a Sparc
    Will> ELC to me...

Interest I have plenty of; time for spin-up, no.  I've looked at the
kernel code; I just don't understand what's going on in a lot of it.
I'm not a hardware geek.

What I can do is build, boot, and bug-report.  Which I do.  Fat lot of
good it's done my soon-to-boot-NetBSD Sparc.

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