Re: [Sheflug] RAID and kernel upgrading.

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>     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.

l-k is not the only place to report oopses, and in fact it's not usable
for most people. l-k's about 6Mb a week, isn't it? It's not something you
subscribe to out of interest, unless you want to get into flame wars with
ESR / fix loads of stuff / etc. There are sub-lists as well, and I would
have thought the sparc port would have it's own mailing list, but it's not
necessarily obvious where the problem is.... 

>     Will> Exactly what happened before commercialisation. Volunteer
>     Will> support.
> But not exactly the same volunteers.  The volunteers are off doing
> something else.

I think it's more interesting to compare the speed of development with the
money going in - most people think that the development has speed up
dramatically, notwithstanding the commercial code going in (i.e., ports
from other OSes, etc.)

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.

The most competitive areas are the bits of the pie most valuable: i.e.,
growing rapidly, most sought after, most visible, etc. Places without
competition are generally things people aren't interested in, hence no
money..

>     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.

To a great extent it depends what you define as 'kernel'. Certainly,
drivers make up a heck of a lot of the code, they run in ring 0 / kernel
space, but most people don't think of them as kernel. The core stuff, MM,
VFS, etc., is only looked after by a few people, but then, this isn't
usually the stuff that's breaking.

>>> 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.

That kind of then defeats the 'many eyes' principle also, surely? As many
people as possible should be running the dev kernels, on many
architectures, otherwise you end up with broken stable releases.

> 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'."

If it's labelled 'experimental', and hooks nowhere else, I don't see what
the problem is?

> 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.)

I think there was also talk of remodelling part of the PCI spec to be more
like USB.. USB also requires devfs I believe. Ho hum...

Cheers,

Alex.


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