Re: [ANNOUNCE] Withdrawl of Open Source NDS Project/NTFS/M2FS for Linux

From: Mike Galbraith (mikeg@weiden.de)
Date: Wed Sep 06 2000 - 00:44:16 EST


On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Richard Gooch wrote:
> Ingo Molnar writes:
>
> > The reference kernel should be IMO 'untainted' though. Believe me,
> > during the 2.3.2x pagecache rewrite my kernel was hacked with ad-hoc
> > debugging code beyond recognition - eg. automatic checksumming of
> > every physical page in the system to detect stray DMA related memory
> > corruption. No rocket science, but ugly enough to 'taint' the
> > kernel proper. Would any of the debugging facilities advocated in
> > this thread have helped in the bugs we were chasing at that time?
> > Nope. Do i want such debugging code to ever show up in the mainsteam
> > kernel? Hell no.
>
> Would you classify IKD as a pile of warts you wouldn't want to see in
> the kernel?

I run IKD 99.99% of the time (maintenance helper bee). Still, I wouldn't
want to see it in the kernel.. except maybe kdb. IKD is very intrusive
from the code readability standpoint. Memleak in particular has a zillion
ugly ifdefs I don't know how to get rid of.

> Surely there must be some useful features that can be included in the
> kernel without uglyfing it or slowing it down (configed out)? Leaving
> aside the social engineering attempts, of course :-)

They can all be configured out, and they are all useful. KDB is the only
one which (imho) could be integrated without uglifying the code.

        -Mike

(What means 'social engineering attempts'?)

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