Torvalds frustrated at missing simultaneous release Linus Torvalds has issued release candidate five for Linux 3.11, but is a little upset with the fact the final release missed a serendipitous anniversary. The date in question is August 11th, 1993, as it was on that day that Windows 3.11 emerged blinking and howling into the world. Torvalds liked the idea that Linux 3.11 …
It's still possible to fit Linux kernel and rootfs in 1MB (e.g. less than a floppy) and make it do something useful. I should know because I've done it, and it is controlling my central heating system. I'd love to find another operating system with similar functionality (USB stack, networking etc...) that's less bloated but I suspect I'd have to write it myself or grab one of the highly experimental offerings from osdev, all very interesting stuff but I don't have 6 months spare to muck about with such things.
@Biff: "I'd love to find another operating system with similar functionality (USB stack, networking etc...) that's less bloated but I suspect I'd have to write it myself or grab one of the highly experimental offerings from osdev, all very interesting stuff but I don't have 6 months spare to muck about with such things."
Yeah, all this Linux stuff is stifling innovation......
>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/
"Four year old article get!"
Ok, how about from last year then? Linus complains again. If you look at the history of Linux, devs have been complaining all the time. That is nothing that going to change. The Linux kernel is badly designed. It is a fact. Read the developers and what they say. There are many more links like this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Linux-Linus-Torvalds-kernel-too-complex-code,14495.html
"Torvalds recently stated that Linux has become "too complex" and he was concerned that developers would not be able to find their way through the software anymore. He complained that even subsystems have become very complex and he told the publication that he is "afraid of the day" when there will be an error that "cannot be evaluated anymore."
...you're talking about things other than the kernel if you mention sudo, that is nothing to do with linux the kernel.
As for a micro kernel, that needs other things around it to work. Not much different from today's modular kernel where the modules are only loaded when they are needed, perhaps because a new piece of hardware has been plugged in.
As for a micro kernel, that needs other things around it to work. Not much different from today's modular kernel where the modules are only loaded when they are needed, perhaps because a new piece of hardware has been plugged in.
Well this is patently not true. A monolithic modular kernel with loadable modules would still load more drivers in to kernel space than a micro or hybrid kernel doing only the most necessary operations in kernel space and offloading to user space less critical operations.
As a concrete example, look at the USB device drivers in v4l-dvb. Under linux, the entire driver runs in the kernel space. Any driver bug, and you have an oops. FreeBSD re-uses the same linux drivers, using a user space daemon talking to a special kernel component, cuse4bsd, which allows user space daemons to communicate with character devices. The only kernel component is cuse4bsd, which is simple, small and easily tested.
The other code, less well tested and more buggy (usually due to cheap hardware and reverse engineered drivers) all runs in user space - any crashes there, and you simply need to restart the user space daemon.
Obviously, this has a cost - it's much more efficient just to run everything in the kernel - but that doesn't change the fact that a micro/hybrid kernel can be vastly more resilient than a monolithic design.
> Linux is so bloated now. Torvolds should
What is stopping YOU from doing whatever that Mr. / Ms. Torvolds [sic] should, in your opinion, be doing?
This is where you start: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/linux-3.10.6.tar.xz
Looking forward to see your results, many thanks in advance for your effort and commitment.
I thought microkernel architecture was largely discredited, due to poor performance.
Yes, microkernels are essentially daft, and result in too much inefficiency. However, almost every Linux distribution now uses pulseaudio, a user space audio daemon, which is essentially performing the function of an audio subsystem in a hybrid or microkernel.
@JDX
"Typical Linuxtard. UI is not considered functionality."
To a linux user the UI is not considered functionality. Why would it be? The UI is a detached and so separate entity to the linux kernel (what is discussed here). The UI would probably mean more to the various builders of UI's for linux.
The UI means a lot more to windows users than linux users because the UI is tied a lot closer in windows. When Ubuntu went Unity people started abandoning ship, but the primary complaint was the lens feature tied into Ubuntu not the desktop. The simple reason that the desktop can be replaced with a single command.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Win95 made the Win32 API the first-class citizen and the Win16 API the guest. That's... actually a fairly substantial infrastructure change."
But as has been pointed out, it is not a kernel change. Windows 95, 98 ane ME, despite MS's attempts to hide it, all ran on varying versions of MS-DOS which itself had not changed much between them.
What quality control? Linux has bad quality control. Even the Linux devs says so, themselves:
http://www.kerneltrap.org/Linux/Active_Merge_Windows
"The [linux source code] tree breaks every day, and it's becoming an extremely non-fun environment to work in. We need to slow down the merging, we need to review things more, we need people to test their f--king changes!"
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
Question: Is it your opinion that the quality of the Linux kernel is in decline? Most developers seem to be pretty sanguine about the overall quality problem.
Andrew Morton: I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix. Obviously we fix bugs as well as add them, but it is very hard to determine what the overall result of this is.
When I'm out and about I will very often hear from people whose machines we broke in ways which I'd never heard about before. I ask them to send a bug report (expecting that nothing will end up being done about it) but they rarely do.
So I don't know where we are and I don't know what to do. All I can do is to encourage testers to report bugs and to be persistent with them, and I continue to stick my thumb in developers' ribs to get something done about them.
I do think that it would be nice to have a bugfix-only kernel release. One which is loudly publicised and during which we encourage everyone to send us their bug reports and we'll spend a couple of months doing nothing else but try to fix them.
The quality control is not that too sharp, if you google a bit. The code is going to pieces.
I sat here tonight dealing with Mint giving me a an error saying it can't install any software due to packages being broken right after a fresh install. After cleaning that up and updating it boots up well only about three times then cant find it's shell on the last. Mr Torvalds I think Linux has bigger issues right now so please forgive me for not giving a flying fsck.
Face palm because there isn't a middle finger icon.
Fresh install of Linux Mint 15, supposedly the most popular Linux distro, when I try to open system settings the program appears in the tray, but I can't open/maximise the window. So after a fresh install I cannot configure the system. I've tried both 32 and 64-bit, different machines. Nice one guys, but I think I'll be going back to Slackware.
@Biff
I had the same bug when I first installed it. Mint 15 really didnt seam ready to be released when it was. If you run the updates it fixes a lot of these initial issues. I stuck with it and it is running much better now. Mint is my favourite and I run it on 3 separate machines but on a fresh install 15 did disappoint.
and updating it boots up well only about three times then cant find it's shell on the last
That sort of transient error suggests to me that you have faulty RAM or, less likely because you'd probably see error messages, disk corruption. Run a memory check from a live CD (if it's not already installed as a grub option) and check logs or run gsmartcontrol to check disks for corruption. If "not able to find its shell" is supposed to mean "not able to find the kernel" then it may be that disks are being detected in a random order at bootup (thanks, BIOS!), and so the root filesystem isn't where grub expects it to be. All Debian-based OSs (including Mint, I guess) have been using UUID-based drive detection for a long time now, so I doubt that's what's going one.
The above assumes, of course, that you're not just causing or making up the problem yourself so you can have some weak trollbait.
HTH.
Your Linux install is broken after an upgrade? You are not alone. Bassbeast explains:
"Sadly friend that is ALL you will get because ultimately the broken driver model has become a religious element, a way to "prove the faithful" by how much they will get behind an obviously and demonstrably bad design.
Quick, how many OSes OTHER than Linux use Torvald's driver model? NONE. How many use stable ABIs? BSD,Solaris, OSX,iOS,Android,Windows, even OS/2 has a stable driver ABI.
I'm a retailer, I have access to more hardware than most and I can tell you the Linux driver model is BROKEN. I can take ANY mainstream distro, download the version from 5 years ago and update to current (thus simulating exactly HALF the lifetime of a Windows OS) and the drivers that worked in the beginning will NOT work at the end.
And before anybody says "Use LTS" that argument doesn't hold water because thanks to the again broken design by Torvalds most software in Linux is tied to the kernel so if you want more than a browser and Open Office? You WILL be forced to upgrade because "this software requires kernel x.xx" or be left behind with older non supported software. With Windows with the exception of games that require a newer version of DirectX (which is rare, most have a DX9 mode for this very reason) you can install the latest and greatest on that 10 year old XP machine and it JUST WORKS.
Again let me end with the simple fact that after NINE YEARS I'm retiring the shop netbox. That is TWO service packs and at LEAST 3000 patches and not a single broken driver, NOT ONE. If Linux wants to compete then it actually HAS to compete, not give us excuses which frankly math can prove doesn't work. Look at the "Let the kernel devs handle drivers" excuse. You have 150,000+ drivers for Linux, with a couple of hundred new devices released WEEKLY..how many Linux kernel devs are there again? if you pumped them full of speed and made them work 24/7/365 the numbers won't add up, the devs simply cannot keep up...which is of course one of the reasons to HAVE a stable ABI in the first place, so that the kernel devs can work on the kernel while the OEMs can concentrate on drivers.
Sorry for the length but this one really irks me, if you like running an OS that is rough because of reasons? Go right ahead, i wish you nothing but luck. But when you compare that broken mess to either OSX or Windows I gotta throw down the red flag and call bullshit, its not even in the same league. Oh and do NOT bring up embedded or servers as that is "moving the goalposts" and honestly i don't care how cool your OS is at webserving, I'm not selling webservers and that isn't the subject at hand. Linux is broken ON THE DESKTOP and that is what we are discussing so try to stay on topic.
I'll leave you with this, if one of the largest OEMs on the entire planet can't get Linux to work without running their own fork, what chance does the rest of us have?"
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1530558/ubuntu-broken-dell-inspiron-mini
... because ultimately the broken driver model has become a religious element ...
So your rant is basically that you want a stable API for implementing device drivers on? Not going to happen:
"Stable API nonsense" doc from the Linux kernel.
Note the last paragraph:
As Linux supports a larger number of different devices "out of the box" than any other operating system, and it supports these devices on more different processor architectures than any other operating system, this proven type of development model must be doing something right :)
"...Note the last paragraph:
As Linux supports a larger number of different devices "out of the box" than any other operating system, and it supports these devices on more different processor architectures than any other operating system, this proven type of development model must be doing something right :) ..."
Maybe you missed all the reports of Linux upgrades breaks the install? Linux device driver model is broken. As soon Linux releases an upgrade, all hardware vendors need to modify and recompile all their device drivers. HP reportedly spends millions on this. Does this sound right to you? HP should migrate to FreeBSD instead.
Are you sure that device drivers are the cause of these broken installations? Because none of the posts I saw above mention it as a problem. And anyway, even if drivers are implicated, there's nothing stopping people sticking with an earlier kernel until new drivers are available in the latest kernel. Most distros trail the current kernel by a few releases anyway, so users are protected from the bleeding edge.
As to HP, are their drivers in the mainline kernel, or are they external to it? If they're external, then why don't they just do the work required to contribute the code once and have it accepted. Then it's up to kernel developers to do the work required if they break anything.
I'm certainly in the camp that says there's nothing broken with the model of having shifting in-kernel APIs. The only time it's ever affected me has been when I needed to get VMWare working again after a kernel update, and even then, if there wasn't an update available for VMWare, the fix was simple: go back to using the old kernel. I certainly don't accept your assertion that the Linux device driver model is broken!
The HP drivers divide into different categories. There are the drivers for the HW based SmartArrays these are included in the main kernel tree, but the SPP includes newer versions than RH ship in 6.X.
Then there's the network drivers they ship in the SPP, these aren't from HP, they're from the chipset vendors and are newer than the ones RH ship in RHEL, they're shipped as source to avoid version issue.
Then there are the non open source drivers for the SW SmartArrays. These aren't included coz they're not GPL or even open. But then I just run md which does what I want on the baby boxes.
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