Linux kernel compatability

Garrett Cooper gcooper at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jan 4 04:15:14 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 7:39 PM, Garrett Wollman
<wollman at hergotha.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> In article <20110104032143$6d5e at grapevine.csail.mit.edu>, Jeff
> Roberson writes:
>
>>The original OFED porting effort I did with John Polstra and the people at
>>Isilon was never updated to my knowledge.  It was more mechanical changes
>>and 'felt' more like FreeBSD but fell so far out of date as to be useless.
>>Interestingly there was originally a porting layer in the ofed stack back
>>as it originally compiled on many operating systems.  However the
>>opensource effort focused on linux and the linux people wouldn't take it
>>without the shims removed.
>
> And that, I am absolutely, 100% willing to ascribe to malice on the
> Linux kernel developers' part.  (And there's more than one example
> like this, not all of them as easily resolved,[1] due to issues with
> licensing and ownership of original-vendor-abandoned code.)
>
> Fundamentally, maintaining any sort of Linux compatibility is a losing
> battle, since the hordes will keep on rototilling interfaces in every
> release until the cows come home, with no concern (and in many cases
> utter contempt) for anyone else who might need to maintain kernel
> code.  It's a testament to their size and ability that they have
> managed to keep the system relatively usable and stable over the long
> term when major parts of the system get replaced on such a regular
> basis.

Yeah... but rototilling cow crap on a regular basis still doesn't make
one a proper farmer :(... bugs occur everywhere of course, but the
complete lack of disregard or interest for testing (even in LTP) seems
to just scream maintenance nightmare longterm. Oh well, I've given up
harping on Linux devs because they don't seem to want to listen, and I
look forward to the day that my committership in that project is done.

I guess big companies that depend on Linux have expendable resources
to toss at projects then; would be nice if we had those resources
*grin*. `Fixing' issues using brute force isn't smart and it's not
scalable, as I'm sure more folks on here are aware than I am.

Thanks,
-Garrett


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