Kernel Traffic #191 by Zack Brown

[email protected] Mon, 11 Nov 2002 07:11:15 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.linux.kernel.kernel-traffic
Message-ID <E18BGDb-0006rR-00@renegade>
                        Kernel Traffic #191 For 11 Nov                         
                                                                               
                                 By Zack Brown                                 
                                                                               
Table Of Contents

  * Standard Format
  * Text Format
  * XML Source
  * Mailing List Stats For This Week
  * Threads Covered
   
    1.  26 Oct  - 1 Nov  (11       Speeding Up kmalloc() System Call           
                         posts)                                                
    2.  29 Oct  - 2 Nov  (6 posts) Dynamically Growing ext2 And ext3           
                                   Filesystems                                 
    3.  29 Oct  - 2 Nov  (16       New SquashFS Highly Compressed Filesystem   
                         posts)                                                
    4.  30 Oct  - 1 Nov  (22       Linux 2.5.45 Released                       
                         posts)                                                
    5.  31 Oct  - 2 Nov  (22       Kconfig Documentation                       
                         posts)                                                
    6.  31 Oct  - 1 Nov  (11       Status Of Xiafs In 2.5                      
                         posts)                                                
    7.  1 Nov  - 5 Nov   (20       Swap-Space Mini-Howto Documentation         
                         posts)                                                
    8.  2 Nov  - 4 Nov   (18       Status Of initramfs                         
                         posts)                                                
    9.  4 Nov  - 5 Nov   (24       New Open POSIX Test Suite                   
                         posts)                                                
    10. 5 Nov  - 6 Nov   (5 posts) Paying For Patches                          
    11. 6 Nov            (1 post)  Graphing Kernel Development                 
   
Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 1927 posts in 11542K.

There were 490 different contributors. 268 posted more than once. 180 posted
last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

  * 71 posts in 213K by Alan Cox
  * 60 posts in 454K by Davide Libenzi
  * 40 posts in 135K by Jens Axboe
  * 39 posts in 190K by Andrew Morton
  * 32 posts in 166K by Denis Vlasenko
  * Full Stats

 

1. Speeding Up kmalloc() System Call
26 Oct  - 1 Nov  (11 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH,RFC] faster kmalloc lookup"

Manfred Spraul found a way to speed up the kmalloc() system call, by allowing
it to quickly pass over memory regions that were obviously too small. He posted
a patch against 2.5.44-mm5 and invited comment. Alan Cox asked about
performance comparisons, and Manfred posted some numbers:

    I've run my slab microbenchmark over the 3 versions:
   
      + current
      + generic_fls
      + i386 asm optimized fls
   
    The test reports the fastest time for 100 kmalloc calls in a tight loop
    (Duron 700). Loop/test overhead substracted.
   
    32-byte alloc:
    current:         41 ticks
    generic_fls:     56 ticks
    bsrl:            54 ticks
    4096 byte alloc: 84 ticks
    generic_fls:     53 ticks
    bsrl:            54 ticks
    
    40 ticks difference for -current between 4096 and 32 bytes - ~4 cycles for
    each loop. bit scan is 10 ticks slower for 32 byte allocs, 30 ticks faster
    for 4096 byte allocs.
   
    No difference between generic_fls and bsrl - the branch predictor can
    easily predict all branches in generic_fls for constant kmalloc calls.
   
Nikita Danilov suggested, "Most kmalloc calls get constant size argument
(usually sizeof(something)). So, if switch() is used in stead of loop (and
kmalloc made inline), compiler would be able to optimize away cache_sizes[]
selection completely. Attached (ugly) patch does this." Marcus Alanen remarked,
"Perhaps a compile-time test to check if the argument is a constant, and only
in that case call your new kmalloc, otherwise a non-inline kmalloc call? With
your current patch, a non-constant size argument to kmalloc means that the
function is inlined anyway, leading to unnecessary bloat in the resulting
image." Nikita agreed with this, and Manfred said:

    I agree, I have an old patch that does that.
   
    http://www.colorfullife.com/~manfred/slab/patch-km_div
   
    Please ignore the part about fixed point division, it's not needed - the
    'div' instructions is now outside of the hot path.
   
    The problem is that the -mm tree contains around 10 slab patches, I want to
    see them in Linus' tree before I add further patches.
   
 

2. Dynamically Growing ext2 And ext3 Filesystems
29 Oct  - 2 Nov  (6 posts) Archive Link: "[PATCH] 2/11 Ext2/3 Updates: Extended
attributes, ACL, etc."

Theodore Y. Ts'o posted a patch and explained, "This patch allows forward
compatibility with future filesystems which are dynamically grown by using an
alternate algorithm for storing the block group descriptors. It's also a bit
more efficient, in that it uses just a little bit less disk space. Currently,
the ext2 filesystem format requires either relocating the inode table, or
reserving space in before doing the on-line resize." He gave a link to a USENIX
article called Planned Extensions to the Ext2/3 Filesystem (http://
e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/extensions-ext23) by himself and Stephen C. Tweedie.
Jeff Garzik asked, "Is the interface for this going to be ext2meta? Al and sct
seemed to agree that that was the best way act upon the filesystem metadata
while it's online... I'll probably be updating that for 2.5.x VFS changes in a
few weeks, that will provide safe online defrag and a good interface for other
metadata interaction." And Theodore replied:

    I'm not sure ext2meta will be sufficient. It's not just a matter of
    modifying the on-disk metadata, as would be needed for defrag, but I would
    also need to modify some of the in-core data structions in the ext2/3
    filesystem data structures. For example, when you resize the filesystem,
    you need to increase the number of group descriptors, which means you need
    to kmalloc, copy, and then kfree sbi->group_desc out from under the mounted
    filesystem.
   
    No doubt ext2meta could be modified so it could "reach out and touch"
    internal ext2/3 fileststem data structures in core. But the locking issues
    involved get really messy.
   
    My original plan was to adapt Andreas Dilger's on-line resizing patch to
    use the new block group layout, which would obviate the need to take the
    filesystem off-line and run ext2prepare first. I'm not opposed to trying to
    do it via ext2meta, but it seems like it might get complicated and hairy
    quite quickly.
   
Alexander Viro remarked, "For all practical purposes, ext2meta is part of ext2
- same driver, two filesystem types. Locking isn't that scary, BTW - I'd looked
into that some time ago and it looked feasible." Jeff agreed with this
assessment, and said he'd post a patch in the next couple weeks.

 

3. New SquashFS Highly Compressed Filesystem
29 Oct  - 2 Nov  (16 posts) Archive Link: "ANNOUNCEMENT: Squashfs released (a
highly compressed filesystem)"

Phillip Lougher announced:

    First release of squashfs. Squashfs is a highly compressed read-only
    filesystem for Linux (kernel 2.4.x). It uses zlib compression to compress
    both files, inodes and directories. Inodes in the system are very small and
    all blocks are packed to minimise data overhead. Block sizes greater than
    4K are supported up to a maximum of 32K.
   
    Squashfs is intended for general read-only filesystem use, for archival
    use, and in embedded systems where low overhead is needed.
   
    Squashfs is available from http://squashfs.sourceforge.net.
   
    The patch file is currently against 2.4.19. There is further info on the
    filesystem design etc. in the README.
   
Samuel Flory asked how squashfs compared with the existing cramfs project, and
Phillip explained:

    Cramfs was the inspiration for squashfs. Squashfs basically gives better
    compression, bigger files/filesystem support, and more inode information.
   
     1. Blocks upto 32K are supported - data is compressed in units of 32K
        which achieves better compression ratios than compressing in 4K blocks.
        Generally using bigger than 4K blocks are a bad idea, because the VFS
        calls the filesystem in 4K pages. Squashfs explictly pushes the extra
        block data into the page cache.
     2. Squashfs compresses inode and directory information in addition to file
        data. Inodes/directories generally compress down to 50%, or say on
        average 8 bytes or less per inode.
     3. All fs data is packed on byte alignments, saving a couple of bytes per
        inode and directory.
     4. Full 32 bit uids/guids are stored (4 bits stored in inode, uses a
        lookup table, to give 48 uids/16 gids). File sizes upto 2^32 are
        supported. Timestamp info is stored. Cramfs truncates uids to 16 bits,
        uids to 8 bits. Cramfs files sizes are upto 2^24. No timestamp info.
        Squashfs takes advantage of metadata compression to have more info with
        smaller metadata overhead.
     5. Symbolic link contents/file indexes are stored inside the inode table,
        giving better compression than if they were compressed individually, or
        not compressed.
     6. The mksquashfs program doesn't store/mmap the filesystem as it is
        created (it performs file duplicate checking against the partially
        written out compressed fs), and so allows larger filesystems to be
        created.
   
    Further info on the fs is contained in the README...
   
Jeff Garzik mentioned that a read/write compressed filesystem would also be
really great. Phillip replied:

    A r/w compressed filesystem may be my next project... As a couple of people
    have mentioned there are compressed r/w filesystems already out there.
   
    As you'll know, there are always tradeoffs with filesystem design, it is
    very difficult to get as good compression with a r/w fs than with a read
    only filesystem. I wanted to get maximum compression, and quite a few of
    the techniques I use rely on its read-only nature.
   
    An append only (i.e. files can be added, but not modified), fs might be a
    useful compromise. With compressed metadata, any modification of files will
    inevitably achive different compression ratios, and so modification of
    metadata/files in place is not an option. Appending modified metadata/data
    brings you to log-structured (journalling) filesystems and compaction (log
    cleaning) requirements with consequent loss of compression.
   
Rob Landley replied:

    A compressed filesystem with dynamically updated random-access files will
    fragment the heck out of itself darn fast. (Seek into the middle of a file
    somewhere, write a block, seek somewhere else, write another block, repeat
    1000 times... Keep in mind that the new compressed block of data will
    almost certainly not be the same size as the old one... It's a mess.)
   
    My potential usage is: I've got a little linux distribution I put together
    called "firmware linux", which builds from source and outputs a zisofs
    image that gets loopback mounted as the root filesystem. (A very alpha
    version could be sucked off of http://216.143.22.141/firmware/fwl-0.8.tar,
    edit "build.sh" to specify the output directory, and then run it. The point
    is, the whole OS and all applications can be upgraded as one file. No
    package management, it's basically a big firmware image.)
   
    The reason I used a zisofs instead of cramfs is that cramfs has a LOT of
    problems with big filesystems. (The finished root partition, with apache
    and samba and ntop and python and rsync and openssh and everything, is
    currently around 100 megs. Yeah, I can trim that down by quite a bit if I
    get time, I'm currently compilling and developing it under itself so I have
    gcc in there and the full set of man pages and everything...)
   
    Mkcramfs seems to barf at somewhere around 16 megs, which is really
    limiting. AND it seems to try to open every file simultaneously (hardlink
    detection?) so it runs out of file handles. (Again, that could be adjusted
    under /proc somewhere, but isn't worth it.)
   
    So it seems that the thing to test this against isn't cramfs, but zisofs.
    Have you looked at that?
   
    I'll take a look myself and get back to you...
   
And Phillip said:

    I looked at both cramfs and ziosfs when writing squashfs. Zisofs is a nice
    fs, but tends to have greater overhead due to the isofs filesystem. On
    tests I've found zisofs images to be between 5% (a single directory with
    lots of small binaries) and 61% (lots of nested directories) bigger than
    the squashfs filesystem.
   
    I believe that squashfs is useful for what you're doing. I'm a bit hesitant
    in saying that, because I'd rather people downloaded it and made up their
    own minds :-)
   
    Thank you for trying it out, and I hope you like it. I'll obviously be
    interested in your thoughts on it.
   
 

4. Linux 2.5.45 Released
30 Oct  - 1 Nov  (22 posts) Archive Link: "Linux v2.5.45"

Linus Torvalds announced 2.5.45 (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.5/
ChangeLog-2.5.45) and said:

    Big changes, lots of merges. A number of the merges are fairly substantial
    too.
   
    Device mapper (LVM2), crypto/ipsec stuff for networking, epoll and giving
    the new kernel configurator a chance. Big things.
   
    And a _lot_ of maintenance, from various architecture updates to USB and
    ISDN and ALSA. Merges with Andrew & Alan etc.. Go out and test
   
Aaron Lehmann pointed out that 'make oldconfig' and 'make menuconfig' now
depended on the QT graphics library, which made no sense to him. Alexander Viro
remarked, "Remove "false" from the rule that spits out annoying shit about
absence of QT (_yes_, I _know_ that I don't have that shite installed, thank
you very much for reminder). Doesn't solve the annoyance problem, though." And
Roman Zippel, close by, said, "Yes, it's a bug. The patch below fixes this
without breaking xconfig. Linus, please apply."

 

5. Kconfig Documentation
31 Oct  - 2 Nov  (22 posts) Archive Link: "Where's the documentation for
Kconfig?"

Matthew Wilcox asked where he could find documentation for the new kconfig
configuration system recently added to the kernel. Roman Zippel gave a pointer
to http://www.xs4all.nl/~zippel/lc/. Christoph Hellwig suggested updating
Documentation/kbuild/config-language.txt with the new information, and Roman
replied that he'd get to that soon. Rusty Russell remarked, "Doco is great, and
it'd be nice to replace what's there, but I think it's remarkably easy to use
in a monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, which is *really* good because that's how
people will use it. Plus, I never realized how slow the old "make oldconfig"
was."

Elsewhere, Russell King asked if any tool had been written to convert a
Config.in file to a kconfig equivalent. He pointed out that the existing lkcc
tool was too extensive, converting whole trees, but not individual files in
their own. Russell had some partially converted directories that were in a
somewhat inconsistent state, that lkcc wouldn't work on. Roman suggested, "You
could put it into arch/tmp/config.in and do 'lkcc tmp'. But converting the
whole tree is the prefered solution, because lkcc needs all the type
information of every symbol used in the config file to do a good job. The
easiest solution is probably to get the 2.5.44 patch from my page, generate a
diff to your converted 2.5.44 tree and apply this patch to 2.5.45. If you send
me a 2.5.44 patch of your tree, I can do it for you." This worked for Russell.

 

6. Status Of Xiafs In 2.5
31 Oct  - 1 Nov  (11 posts) Archive Link: "Xiafs inclusion in 2.5?"

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger quoted a post from Linus Torvalds back in the year 2000,
when he said, "Who still remembers xiafs? We have 33 different filesystems in
the kernel tree - something that is quite impressive, and something that I
don't think anybody else has ever tried to support. But we could have had 34.."
Carl replied now, "Out of curiosity, would you reaccept xiafs in 2.5, if it was
cleaned up and forward ported to use the new interfaces? And if you accept it,
what's the latest date I could submit it? Technically, it is a regression, ;-)
so the feature freeze date might not apply." H. Peter Anvin felt there would be
no point whatsoever to this, but Carl replied that it would be fun! Andries
Brouwer looked around his house and found an old floppy with an Xiafs format.
He said he'd like to be able to read it again without booting a 2.0 kernel.
Elsewhere, Linus replied to Carl's initial post, "Quite frankly, I probably
_would_ accept it, if it's cleanly done. If only because of the fact that it's
such a ridiculous thing to do, and thus gets high points on my "surreality
meter"." And he added, "Yeah, I think xiafs has little to do with a feature
freeze. It has little to do with sanity too, for that matter. I saw that
Andries still has one xia floppy somewhere, and that probably puts him in a
rather unique position. I can't imagine that very many people really care, but
it's a ironic form of retrocomputing..." This inspired Carl to ask Andries for
an image of his floppy, and Andries gave him a pointer (ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/
aeb/linux0.99pl7.xiafs) .

 

7. Swap-Space Mini-Howto Documentation
1 Nov  - 5 Nov  (20 posts) Archive Link: "[announce] swap mini-howto"

Randy Dunlap was surprised to find no mini-howto on the web that covered
swap-space, so he created one and gave a temporary link (http://
www.xenotime.net/linux/swap-mini-howto.txt) to it. A number of folks also
expressed surprise at not finding a similar doc anywhere. Various people read
Randy's doc and offered suggestions; and a number of folks said that the Linux
Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) was the best place to ptu it.
At one point Gabor MICSKO also said, "I translated this doc to Hungarian
language. You can read the translated doc this url: http://www.hup.hu/
modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1976"

 

8. Status Of initramfs
2 Nov  - 4 Nov  (18 posts) Archive Link: "[BK PATCHES] initramfs merge, part 1
of N"

Jeff Garzik said:

    The attached below is the first of several changes for initramfs / early
    userspace.
   
    This change is intentionally very simple, not really proving its worth
    until next week when patches 2 and 3 in this series arrive in your inbox. A
    description of "the future" follows description of this specific cset.
   
     1. Introduce init/initramfs.c itself, which is a module that uncompresses
        a .cpio.gz archive, and uses it to populate rootfs with files early
        very in the bootup process (between signals_init and proc_root_init in
        init/main.c). People will see a small listing in dmesg of unpacked
        files. We need to keep this for now (and for now it's small), but we
        may want to remove this output or turn the knob down to KERN_DEBUG
        before 2.6.x release:
       
           -> file1
           -> file2
           -> etc...
        
        (architecture maintainers note!)
       
     2. Introduce ARCHBLOBLFLAGS in arch/$arch/Makefile, for turning an
        arbitrary binary object into a .o file using objcopy.
     3. Link the initramfs cpio archive in vmlinux image via arch/$arch/
        vmlinux.lds.S, in the init section.
     4. Introduce the new linux/usr directory. Currently it is not very
        interesting, only containing a small host-built proggie that generates
        the initial cpio archive, gen_init_cpio. This program will go away when
        early userspace is further along. It currently exists to show initramfs
        is working, by allowing us to remove three simple lines from init/
        do_mounts.c.
   
He went on to describe future development:

    Early userspace is going to be merged in a series of evolutionary changes,
    following what I call "The Al Viro model." NO KERNEL BEHAVIOR SHOULD
    CHANGE. [that's for the lkml listeners, not you <g>] "make" will continue
    to simply Do The Right Thing(tm) on all platforms, while the kernel image
    continues to get progressively smaller. Here is the initial plan for early
    userspace, i.e. the patches you are going to be seeing next week:
   
    #2 - merge klibc.
   
    As I said earlier, I am not sure if we will wind up removing klibc just
    before 2.6.x release or not. Comments welcome. But for now, klibc will be
    merged into the kernel tarball, because otherwise version drift during the
    evolution of early userspace will be a huge PITA, and slow things down. It
    is a tiny libc written specifically for the kernel.
   
    This patch will add klibc to the build system, and create a tiny,
    statically-linked binary "kinit". kinit is the beginnings of early
    userspace. Some tiny, token amount of do_mounts.c code will be moving into
    kinit in patch #2, only enough to prove the system is working.
   
    #3 - move initrd to userspace
   
    Unfortunately we don't start seeing tangible benefits to early userspace
    until this patch, but that's how evolution works :) Here, initrd unpacking
    code is moved to userspace, as much as possible. Some initrd code will
    inevitably stay in the kernel, because it is arch-specific how to grab the
    initrd image from bootmem [or whereever], but the vast majority of initrd
    code goes poof (yay!). No initrd behavior will change at all, from current
    kernels. It is simply getting moved to early userspace. Users will not need
    to do anything on their end to make sure their existing setups continue to
    work -- any such actions are a bug on my part.
   
    This patch will also turn "kinit" into a shared binary, and introduce the
    gzip binary into early userspace. [see "Items For Discussion" below, too,
    WRT this.]
   
    #4 - move mounting root to userspace
   
    People probably breathed a sigh of relief at patch #3, they will heave a
    bigger sigh for this patch :) This moves mounting of the root filesystem to
    early userspace, including getting rid of NFSroot/bootp/dhcp code in the
    kernel.
   
    #N - to infinity... and beyond!
   
    I, and hopefully others, will continue in the series of evolutionary
    patches, moving more and more stuff to early userspace. There are a lot of
    possibilities, and I will be looking for input from others on useful things
    to move, as well as continuing my own work of finding items that can be
    moved.
   
 

9. New Open POSIX Test Suite
4 Nov  - 5 Nov  (24 posts) Archive Link: "[ANNOUNCE] Open POSIX Test Suite"

Geoff Gustafson announced:

    I would like to announce a new project to develop and/or assemble a GPL
    test suite for POSIX APIs. The tests will focus on conformance to the IEEE
    Std 1003.1-2001, but will also include separate functional and stress
    tests.
   
    The project's current approach to conformance testing is to record
    assertions from a close reading of the POSIX specifications, and write
    minimal test cases that prove or disprove these assertions. The test suite
    will be independent of specific API implementations, and will eventually be
    easily configurable to work with different implementations. The project
    aims for OS independence, using only POSIX APIs, the autoconf suite, and
    simple shell support. However, it is currently only being tested on Linux.
   
    Ultimately, the plan is to use the test suite to evaluate current support
    in Linux, as well as new implementations being considered in the open
    source community, and then contribute patches or at least bug reports (with
    a minimal test case) to the appropriate places, like LKML.
   
    Contributions of any test cases, review of the work, discussion of the
    approach, etc. are very welcome. Join the development mailing list,
    posixtest-discuss. The initial focus is on Signals, Message Queues,
    Threads, Semaphores, and Clocks & Timers, based on current interests and
    resources. You can help in these areas, or start work on another area of
    the spec. There will need to be some uniformity across the suite, but many
    details have yet to be worked out, so your involvement in those decisions
    help a lot.
   
    For more information, see the project website at http://
    posixtest.sourceforge.net
   
Larry McVoy replied:

    Great idea. We can help in the following way: BitKeeper has an extremely
    simple test harness used for regressions. It's well thought out in that it
    is trivial to write simple tests and run them in isolation or to run the
    whole suite. If you want the harness, we'll give it to you under whatever
    license you want, I assume GPL, but we don't care.
   
    You can see what the tests look like in BK, if you have it installed, we
    ship all the tests, they are in `bk bin`/t
   
    A simple test might be
   
            #!/bin/sh
    
            # test that touch creates a file
            touch foo
            test -f foo || {
                    echo failed to create foo
                    exit 1
            }
    
    The harness takes care of putting you in a clean isolated environment.
   
Geoff said this would be great, and that he'd check out BitKeeper.

Elsewhere, Jeff Garzik speculated:

    I wonder if any vendors, or independent groups, would be interested in
    maintaining a POSIX compliancy patchkit for the Linux kernel?
   
    IMO such a "POSIX Linux" project would be useful for several reasons.
    Overall, I think there is pressure from several directions to get all sorts
    of POSIX APIs into the kernel. On occasion, kernel hackers are confronted
    with a situation where complete POSIX compliancy may mean a compromise in
    some area, be it performance, security, API issues, code cleanliness
    issues, etc. Or simply that the POSIX-related code just isn't ready to be
    merged into the mainline kernel yet.
   
    The vendors also benefit by this, because the barrier to entry in
    POSIX-related cases would be lowered, which would in turn satisfy the
    demands of customers. Which would in turn give the mainline kernel all the
    software engineering benefits that come from a more reasoned and gradual
    review and merge of new features.
   
    Does something like this already exist? This would need to be an open,
    vendor-neutral project...
   
Rik van Riel volunteered to help, and Geoff added, "I agree this sounds very
useful. I could do something like this as part of the test suite project; this
would expand the scope to include testing and reporting the status of the
latest patches." Andreas Dilger suggested that it might be better to use the
existing test suite from X/Open; but a couple folks (including Geoff) pointed
out that the X/Open tests of POSIX extensions more recent than 1990 were not
free.

A number of folks suggested that Geoff's work really belonged in the LTP (http:
//ltp.sf.net) project. Geoff pointed out that LTP seemed to concern itself with
testing interfaces that had already been implemented in the kernel; while his
project focused on testing interfaces that had not yet been implemented, and
testing them whether in the kernel or user-space. But several folks from LTP
said LTP would love to extend their test suite in this area. The thread ended
inconclusively.

 

10. Paying For Patches
5 Nov  - 6 Nov  (5 posts) Archive Link: "PATCH: Driver Maintainers"

Alan Cox posted an odd patch and explained:

    I've been getting more and more people talking to me looking to pay people
    to fix small Linux bugs but having problems finding smaller companies.
    Obviously wanting to send $1000 to have someone fix a driver simply doesn't
    work when you talk to big companies.
   
    One thing the FSF do which is rather sensible is keep a list in the
    packages of people who you can pay to fix stuff in them. I asked on
    Linux-kernel and got a small initial set of company responses. hopefully
    more will appear once its merged.
   
    The order is alphabetical logically enough
   
    [Marcelo this seems to apply cleanly to 2.4 as well]
   
Linus Torvalds replied:

    I would really prefer for there to be some kind of explicit requirements
    for this. Even if we don't endorse the thing, I'd hate to have a bad egg or
    two (assuming this expands a lot, which I think it might) causing trouble.
   
    I'd also like for it to be explicitly only for individuals or small
    companies ( "less than x people" ), or some other way make sure that the
    thing is balanced and we set peoples expectations right (both users of the
    list as well as people who want to be on the list).
   
    Also, is the kernel source really the right place for this, considering
    that many people will have sources that are years old and there is no way
    to remove potential problematic entries from already-released kernels? In
    other words, wouldn't it be better to have some nice place on the web and a
    pointer to that in the kernel sources?
   
Alan said:

    Fair comment. I can happily put it on a web site with a pointer instead any
    preferences to a location like kernel.org or just 'wherever'
   
    Splitting it up by company is easy enough to do - split the web page into
    "Interested in contracts below $1000, $10000, $100000, $1M, ..." sections
   
    One could construct a verifiable non-repuditable rating scheme I guess.
    That depends if its worth it
   
        "People who paid for bug fixes in the 3c501 driver also bought MacIIfx
        support contracts..."
       
 

11. Graphing Kernel Development
6 Nov  (1 post) Archive Link: "Charts of the evolution of 2.5"

Guillaume Boissiere said:

    I put together some graphs showing the evolution of features for the 2.5
    kernel here:
   
    http://kernelnewbies.org/status/Linux_Kernel_2_5_Progress.png
    http://kernelnewbies.org/status/Linux_Kernel_2_5_Compounded_Progress.png
   
    Since most features evolve over time as opposed to being a one-time deal,
    it does pretend to be fully accurate but it does give a good sense of the
    development lifecycle.
   
    Funny how the rate of merges grew rapidly just before feature freeze :-)
   
 

 

 

 

 

 

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