Re: [Sheflug] RAID and kernel upgrading.

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

>>>>> "Al" == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

    Al> l-k is not the only place to report oopses, and in fact it's
    Al> not usable for most people.

Dunno.  I'm glad I decided to let Chris do it for me ;-)

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

Dunno.  This is really interesting.  But are people counting vaporware
features or solid code when they talk about development speedup?  Eg,
most people I know think that Linux SMP, while cool in principle,
basically doesn't give you anywhere near the extra BogoMIPS that Linux
on a single processor does.  SMP is hard, but so are all the really
core things about improving stability, reliability, and conformance.

I just don't know.  Nobody really knows how to _measure_ that kind of
thing.

    >>>> 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.

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

I guess; but that's besides Will's point (even though I disagree with
him).  Nobody, Linus least of all, suggests using dev kernels to
manage nuclear reactors.  Sure, we want to test them under load, but
nobody will get mad if you only run 2.odd.x on one or two of the 20
hosts in your server farm.

    >> 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'."

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

Precisely.  The point being that it is possible to add features and
whole subsystems with minimal impact on the kernel.  Certain ones,
anyway.  I was shocked when I read that.  Pleasantly, of course.

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

devfs would cause some problems; not least with Linus.

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