Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Simplifying the code should always be the initial proposal. Adding more complexity on top is the worst-case when-all-else-failed option. Yet we so often reach for that option first :(

-- Andrew Morton

If this code were a character driver for an obscure serial port on a lesser-known chip architecture, I don't think it would get any attention at all. As it is, it's looking like at least a few man months of work will be required, as well as some relatively unneeded changes to Android user space, to get this feature into a permanently acceptable state. I wouldn't be surprised to see this stretch into a few calendar years.

Code that specializes the kernel in weird ways is accepted into the kernel all the time, and I've tried to figure out why this particular bit of code is treated differently. Especially since this code is self-contained, configurable, and imposes no perceivable long-term maintenance burden.

-- Tim Bird

So, I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again:

Yes, you are special and unique, just like everyone else.

The next person who says the "embedded is different" phrase again, owes me a beer of my choice.

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 13, 2012 17:25 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

A couple of observations.

1. Andrew Morton is the most practical, best engineering software engineer I've had the pleasure to follow.

2. Greg K-H is right about the more mainstream parts of the embedded world. They are general-purpose machines. But his comparison to 8-way SMP is odd. Even back then 8-way was not a very large or particularly special machine. The REALLY big iron guys have done a lot of Linux customization over the years. I'm not intimately familiar with the details and don't know how much of that can be generalized but there are almost certainly many special cases on both extremes.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 13, 2012 17:41 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Am I the only LWN reader who is still sad about 4k stacks going away? I'd use this "embedded" feature on some simple servers if possible.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 20, 2012 6:56 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

No, I always used the 4K pages too and am also sad it disappeared.

I find it ridiculous that something so simple and self contained as
the Android logger code is being rejected.

Logger

Posted Jan 20, 2012 8:57 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It is rather premature to say that the logger is being rejected. It is being discussed. What eventually gets in may not look all that much like the current logger code, but that is different from saying like the patch is being rejected.

Now binder, on the other hand...

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 13, 2012 22:25 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

when 8-way SMP machines came out, they were very much 'big iron', at the time almost nobody had even a 2-way SMP machine, and as such, any support for SMP was a 'big iron' feature

Greg may have had the time slightly wrong, but even if he was off by a few years and the real figure is 15 years instead of 10 years, his point is still valid.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jan 28, 2012 3:47 UTC (Sat) by vomlehn (subscriber, #45588) [Link]

Embedded *is* different, just not very. The bigest difference is that the user has a more restricted view of what's going on inside the box. That makes it more of a pain for developers to know what's happening when it isn't what they want. Oh, one more thing--it's pretty hard to accidentally flush a server down a toilet.