Some 4.20 development statistics - core kernel distinction

Posted Dec 29, 2018 11:12 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790)
In reply to: Some 4.20 development statistics by marcH
Parent article: Some 4.20 development statistics

I am a native English speaker but I parsed the sentence slightly differently. If you think of the code in the linux kernel as many subsystems: I think the distinction here is between "core kernel" - the stuff at the very heart, in the middle, at the centre of it all, that really matters to every system - as then described and "device drivers, peripheral code and other - potentially less important?? - stuff" around that. Think of the centre of the earth :)

If you're very old / working in specialist computing restoration / reading old books - "core" is an actual toroidal core per bit of memory. The Apollo 8 flight computers had physical core memory, for example.

Some 4.20 development statistics - core kernel distinction

Posted Dec 29, 2018 11:42 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

I have some idea of what "core-kernel" means, sorry I should have explained better. What I'm wondering is whether the two English words mean the same thing as far as computing (not just Linux) is concerned, for instance whether "kernel-core" or "core-core" could be used instead and mean the exact same thing.

Some 4.20 development statistics - core kernel distinction

Posted Dec 29, 2018 12:38 UTC (Sat) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

> "kernel-core" or "core-core" could be used instead and mean the exact same thing

These don't mean the same thing, and in fact don't make much sense without additional context. As you mentioned, 'kernel' has a specific meaning in computing, while 'core' is used more generically[1].

The phrase 'core-kernel' is short for 'core of the kernel', i.e. it implies possession: the kernel has a core. We already know what 'kernel' refers to (the Linux kernel), so it makes sense to refer to its core without further explanation. Applying the same reasoning to 'kernel-core'---which expands to 'kernel of the core'---the phrase becomes confusing, because 'core' is a less specific term than 'kernel' and it's not clear which core we are referring to. 'Core' can't be referring to the Linux Kernel (because otherwise we just would have said 'kernel' rather than 'core'), and it's not obvious what else it might refer to, since it's such a generic term.

Side note: If the phrase did not have a hyphen (i.e. "core kernel developers"), I would have parsed it as "core (kernel developers)" rather than "(core kernel) developers". Meaning 'those developers who are at the core of the kernel development community'.

[1] Except when it also has a specific meaning, e.g. in 'core dump'

Some 4.20 development statistics - core kernel distinction

Posted Dec 29, 2018 15:58 UTC (Sat) by gevaerts (subscriber, #21521) [Link]

I suspect there's a kernel of truth in your observation