Quotes of the week

We've already got way too many incomplete concepts and APIs in the kernel. Maybe i'm over-worrying, but i fear we end up like with capabilities or sendfile - code merged too soon and never completed for many years - perhaps never completed at all. VMS and WNT did those things a bit better i think - their API frameworks were/are pervasive and complete, even in the corner cases.

[W]hat concerns me is that stringbuf was good, but not great. Yet I always think of the kernel as a bastion of really good C code and practice, carefully honed by thoughtful coders. Here even the unmeasured optimization attempts show a lack of effort on the part of experienced kernel coders.

What makes the code in the kernel so great is not that it goes in perfect, it's that we whittle all code in the tree down over and over again until it reaches it's perfect form. It is this whittling system that allows us to thrust 25MB of changes into a tree over a week and a half and it all works out.