Re: [Sheflug] RAID and kernel upgrading.

[Will Newton <nospam [at] misconception.org.uk>]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Al Hudson wrote:

> 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.... 

l-k does not require subscription to post, and there are web interfaces to
the archives.

> 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..

Not necessarily. e.g. Lineo don't seem to have too much competition (OK,
so they bought a lot of it)

> 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.

>From about 2.3.51 onwards the VM was quite badly broken. In the end Juan
Quintela and Rik van Riel fixed it. Rik is the guy who is "in charge" of
#kernelnewbies, trying to get more people into kernel development.

> 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.

They are not to be used in distros or by people who don't want to risk
crashing production systems. If you have the time, inclination and
expertise you can use dev. kernels. The tag of "unstable" is a warning for
the unwary.

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

There is a suprising amount of new stuff inside 2.3. The SMP stuff for
example has been much advanced, which does affect many areas of the
kernel.

> 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...

No.
I don't think anything REQUIRES devfs at this moment. IMHO it should have
gone into 2.5, but Linus seems to like it.


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