Re: Linux is moving too fast

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Fielder George Dowding wrote:

> Now then, what, if anything, shall we AKLUG'ers do?
>
> Can those of us in AKLUG who are interested in such things, band
> together to help with debugging the kernel? This seems to be a need that
> Babcock brought up and even quoted corbet in lwn (it must have been a
> previous article that I didn't read):
>
> <blockquote>At the summit, Morton said he wanted to appoint "a nasty
> person" to be kernel bugmaster, someone to identify bug sources and
> "beat up on developers who do not fix bugs," according to kernel
> developer Jonathan Corbet's account, published by the Linux Foundation.
> Natalie Protasevich was named bugmaster, and Morton says she has brought
> more discipline to bug clean-up, even if she falls short of his
> description of preferred temperament. There were more than 1,500 bugs in
> the kernel's Bugzilla database; it's down to 1,400.
> </blockquote>
>
> I have a difficult time telling the difference between a software bug,
> bad hardware, and my own fat finger and slow speed brain when things
> don't seem to be working the way I either expect or want.
>
> Perhaps helping Natalie in not something of wide enough interest for
> AKLUG'ers to support. I bet there is something, like the Friday Night
> Laboratory Session, that a sub-group could take on to help free software
> in dominating the world.

That really depends on whether you think the current development model is
just short of bodies or has an inherently flawed model. While I don't doubt
that the extra bodies will help, it won't cure some of the core problems
here.

If you want to just improve upon a bad situation you could create regression
tests which exercise functionality within the kernel. You could also
maintain a database of performance metrics that can help identify more
pervasive problems in things like the scheduler or block I/O layers.

Outside of that, unless you have a specific area of interest and some good C
skills, the kernel is a big source tree you can get lost in.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Mon Oct 22 14:57:53 2007