Re: [Announce] BKL shifting into drivers and filesystems - beware

From: Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Date: Thu Jul 13 2000 - 16:40:03 EST


> Breaking the device drivers, protocol stacks, disk drivers, file
> systems, etc. out of the kernel proper and forcing them to always be
> loadable modules would achieve this end with the added benefit of
> allowing folks to plug in their own optimized binary versions -- Like

It breaks if you distribute them seperately. We have this problem in the way
the model works. It suprised me until I understood what is going on

I claim:
Free software development is about minimising information exchange and knowledge
of external modules.

The practical upshot of this is we generate a fair amount of duplicated code.
Worse because of the 'minimising information exchange' aspect most developers
do not aggressively track the modules they initially took their skeleton code
from - thus we get bug replication.

One thing I have to do with many bug fixes is to grep the tree to see who
else copied the bug. That needs a single tree.

Alan

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