Re: The most insane proposal in regard to the Linux kernel development

From: Artem S. Tashkinov
Date: Thu Apr 07 2016 - 05:01:13 EST


On 2016-04-07 01:05, Greg KH wrote:
On Sat, Apr 02, 2016 at 05:43:47PM +0500, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote:
One very big justification of this proposal is that core Linux development
(I'm talking about various subsystems like mm/ ipc/ and interfaces under
block/ fs/ security/ sound/ etc. ) has slowed down significantly over the
past years so radical changes which warrant new kernel API/ABI are less
likely to be introduced.

That's not true at all, the change is constant, and increasing, just
look at the tree for proof of that.

Please, share your opinion.

Please read Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt for my opinion, and
that of the current developers.

If you don't agree with this, that's fine, you are welcome to fork the
kernel at any specific point and keep that api stable, just like many
companies do and make money from it (SuSE, Red Hat, etc.)

best of luck with your kernel project,


Tell me, why no one in the Linux kernel dev team is concerned that:

1) There is up to a hundred regressions in each kernel release where a big chunk of them are caused by internal API changes?
2) API changes sometimes require drastic changes in every related hardware driver and since there's no way you can realistically test the code or the hardware, people later discover that their hardware has stopped working?
3) The core kernel developers do not have enough expertise to correctly update the entire kernel source tree so little things get broken?
4) Developing drivers for a moving target is a Herculean job?
5) You cannot easily bisect kernel regressions because regressions are often caused by things _outside_ of the problem you're experiencing.
6) You cannot use new drivers for you hardware on your old kernel, because new drivers are incompatible with an old source tree (don't remind me of RHEL's kernel - it's a rare exception and they usually port only the drivers their respective clients use).
7) Tech unsavvy people cannot realistically debug the kernel.

Hey, please, do not tell me that you're doing a great job following postings in LKML or resolving bugs files in bugzilla. You do a very lousy job indeed - multiple postings in LKML get zero replies because a corresponding developer is either not subscribed to LKML at all, or he has missed the message. There are literally hundreds(!) of bugs in bugzilla which have ZERO replies. What's more, a great number of kernel developers do not have accounts in bugzilla and they don't read corresponding mailing lists.

What the hell is wrong with you guys? You're developing the kernel like it's your toy project.

1) There's no accountability whatsoever.
2) There are no unit tests. Not a single one.
3) There's no surefire way to contact developers who have commited "bad" code.
4) There's no sense of direction.
5) There's no easy way to debug the kernel.

For instance, let's talk about the revoke() call. Right now, if a certain IO device is removed while files on it are still open (there are multiple ways of opening files in Linux, starting from fopen() and ending with mmap()), the kernel state is basically undefined(!). Great! The corresponding mount point cannot be reused(!). Whatever program, which has its files' descriptors on this accidentally removed device, usually cannot gracefully quit or continue working. How on Earth this syscall doesn't get the utmost attention?

Then we have bug 12309(1). My last comment to this bug gives a very simple way of reproducing it on all Android devices.

Then we have bug 15875(2) which will probably take just ten man hours to be resolved, yet there is no interest at all, yet thousands of people have very real problems due to it.

Tell me, are you really proud of yourselves?
Tell me, do you develop the kernel for your amusement, ego, your employee or for average people to use?
Tell me, are you really interested in more people migrating from stable long term supported OSes to Linux?

I want some truly honest answers. And let's not repeat this mantra "we don't have enough resources". You have enough resources to break API/ABIs in a huge way, you have enough resources to introduce regressions - you only don't have enough resources to have any resemblance of a responsible development process.

Best regards,

Artem

1) https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309
2) https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875