Kernel Changes Draw Concern

Saeed al-Sahaf writes "Is the Linux kernel becoming fat and unstable? Computer Associates seems to think so. Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates, said the kernel is 'getting fatter. We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel. We are interested in a more stable kernel.' There continues to be a huge debate over what technology to fold into the Linux kernel, and Andrew Morton, the current maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, expands on these subjects in this article at eWeek."

No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A real step towards the desktop is for the average user to be able to build a sleek customized kernel, right?

I think they have this nifty thing called CONFIG

[Vlad_Drak]

That lets you not have ISDN, USB Dildo, and/or Ham radio support.

Not what we want.

[ShaniaTwain]

"We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel."

..we want text, orange, perhaps green on a black background. We want large buzzing metal boxes that only we are allowed access to. We want to store our data on large spinning reels of magnetic tape, or better yet punch cards.

also we want a sandwich.

That is all.

BS

[DrLZRDMN]

I have never heard of there being a problem with too many music drivers in the Linux kernel....Or any music drivers in the Linux kernel....In fact, I have never heard of music drivers at all

Re:Hypocritical

[NanoGator]

"I think it's laughable that Computer Associates talking about other people's bloated software."

Hey, if they're experts on it....

Re:Inevitable event

[value_added]

I hope I don't get a troll rating on this, but I think that as any kernel grows, it becomes exponentially more difficult to project all of the possible interactions between components.

Actually, that's not the case at all according to this new NY Times Article [nytimes.com]

...the Purdue researchers say the real explosive secret lies in the hull, or pericarp ... In some varieties, the pericarp becomes more moistureproof as it is heated, sealing in the steam until the pressure gets so high that the hull fractures and the kernel goes pop.

In other varieties that don't undergo heat-induced change, the moisture escapes, the hull never breaks and then the kernel goes pfffft.

Re:Just my $0.02

[Master of Transhuman]

Thanks for this exposition of conventional wisdom.

When you have something specific to pin this on, I'm sure we'd all like to hear from you again.

Re:I think they have this nifty thing called CONFI

[MighMoS]

Yeah. If you really wanna have some fun, do a "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dildo" for hours of fun!

Re:Compiled Kernel not necessarily getting fatter.

[prog-guru]

And even then, I wish they could compress it somehow ;)

Re:What about older hardware!

[Tony Hoyle]

Then go back and read the specs for Longhorn: a GB of RAM, a terabyte of hard disk, and a minimum 3GHz CPU.

You're shitting me. Who the hell is going to use it with those kind of requirements?

Re:Just my $0.02

[gfody]

what's wrong with a modular micro kernel design? why must these things be compiled in? what about late binding? I've never been a fan of the macro kernel design for exactly these reasons and it seems like obviously the wrong design for a kernel anyways?

Re:What about older hardware!

[farble1670]

i have a 650Mhz toshiba laptop, 256MB with fedora core 2 installed. it is barely usable by modern standards. it is almost out of memory with firefox started. i don't know if this is because of the window system, or because the kernel is large therefore not leaving enough room for the window system.

i am not saying this is any worse than any other OS, but for desktop use, such a system doesn't cut it.

no, i did not re-compile the kernel.

Re:Not what we want.

[sharkey]

I don't even see the punch cards anymore. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead...

Fat and Unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like most linux users.

Re:Microkernels...

[argent]

Microkernels, and messaging, were an academic fad of 1988-1997 by which time Tanenbaum/CMU/Inria were shown to be wrong, and classic Unix e.g. Solaris; Linux correct

Well, you sure have the Official Linux Policy down pat. It's a good line of patter, pointing at a small bunch of academic systems that came along fairly late and acting as if all the earlier and still in production real-time microkernels didn't exist... or tat they're somehow "not microkernels" because they don't fit the Official Linux Policy definition of a microkernel.

The ones I've had most experience with are RSX-11 and AmigaOS, but pretty much all hard real-time systems have a similar structure. There is a huge history of successful microkernels and, no matter how much Linus was soured on them by his experience with Minix, it's an effective and efficient way to build a system. The problem with Microkernels is you have to make sure that you haven't built in single-threaded bottlenecks that every process has to work through, like the Minix file system. Monolithic kernels largely avoid this issue, at least up to the point where they have to deal with a multi-CPU environment and the simple "single kernel lock" becomes the same kind of bottleneck.

See, concurrency is hard. Both designs force you to work through concurrency problems. Microkernels hit the concurrency wall earlier, but you only have to climb over it once. Monolithic kernels have to keep adding more and more heuristics to work around it, and that itself is a cause of kernel bloat.

Which is where we came in.

Re:Just my $0.02

[jc42]

Big changes are coming to the kernel that are really going to improve Linux and its functionality in the buisness and home world.

Yeah, and we know that Linux Will Never Be Ready For The Desktop until firefox and thunderbird are integrated into the kernel.

Re:Just my $0.02

[jc42]

what's wrong with a modular micro kernel design? why must these things be compiled in? ...

Because that's not how Microsoft does it. And the business world will never accept linux until it's changed to mimic MS Windows' design. Haven't you been listening to what people have been saying here for the past N years? It's routine to point out a good design feature of linux and claim that that's why linux Isn't Ready For The Desktop, and won't be until that design is changed. This is mentioned more often than the impending death of *BSD.

(Lessee, do I need a ;-) here? Nah ...

Re:Just my $0.02

[metamatic]

Linus is never going to admit that Andy Tanenbaum was right about microkernels...

Re:I think they have this nifty thing called CONFI

[JungleBoy]

Great, now I have to go grep my kernel tree for 'dildo' just to see if there really is a kernel driver for a USB Dildo. Thanks.

Re:Just my $0.02

[SnowZero]

And Mach/Hurd/L4 have demonstrated just how microkernels will develop rapidly and eclipse macrokernels with their superior features.

Re:Just my $0.02

[Daengbo]

At that point, the GNU/Linux debate should be over... It all really is the kernel...

Re:Just my 5 bytes

[Teemu Alviola]

Bah, "640k should be enough for everyone" ..well at least for 2.4.x, for normal desktop use. :)

Re:Take a look at the linux-tiny patchset

[carnivore302]

I once ended up with a kernel of 0K. Unfortunately, it wouldn't boot.

Re:Just my $0.02

[PhraudulentOne]

Damnit, I don't want DirectX 9 In my XP Pro!

Happy?