Linux kernel compatability

Jeff Roberson jroberson at jroberson.net
Tue Jan 4 04:56:13 UTC 2011


On Mon, 3 Jan 2011, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> 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 and 'felt' more like FreeBSD but fell so far out of date as to be useless.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.

Hey guys.  I appreciate this discussion and I think it's valuable in 
another context but let's try to keep the linux derision out of the 
mailing archives for our architectural discussion group.

Thanks,
Jeff

>
> Thanks,
> -Garrett
>


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