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> It's just sad how people always try to "improve" on old standard interfaces by then over-designing the improvements to the point where the new interface is ju
by ttflee 9y ago
> It's just sad how people always try to "improve" on old standard interfaces by then over-designing the improvements to the point where the new interface is just overwhelmed by complexity.
Did Linus also criticize the complexity and untested nature of systemd?
- krylon 9y agoI vaguely remember Linus finding some strong words when the systemd developers wanted to integrate dbus into the kernel. (IIRC, they claimed it offered better performance, Linus ran some benchmarks and claimed the kernel-dbus implementation performed worse than the regular dbus daemon. My memory on the subject is fairly vague, though, so don't take my word on it.)
- craftyguy 9y agoHow is systemd an 'interface'?
- thomastjeffery 9y agoIt's how you interact with daemons.
- craftyguy 9y agoAh, right. I suppose it could also be argued that the kernel is also unnecessarily complex as well?
- ramenmeal 9y agoEh its a little different. Your analogy would be more correct if we kept adding to the BIOS interface till it got large, rather than starting from scratch.
- JdeBP 9y agoActually, that is what happened in the years before EFI. The API for old style PC/AT and PC98 firmware is a patchwork mess of oftentimes-conflicting subsystems that grew over the years.
- pebers 9y agoPossibly, but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex; there is nothing else to do all the things that it does. Whereas for BIOS and EFI the argument would be that they should do as little as possible to hand over to the real operating system.
- AstralStorm 9y agoOr at least possible to reduce to a minimum start-up set. Which is possible with EFI but thanks to mainboard manufacturers and Intel and AMD being secretive plus crypto signing everything... not at all.
- garmaine 9y ago> but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex I would like to offer, as a counter example, every micro kernel ever.
- zaarn 9y agoYou mean all those micro kernels that are in widespread use and see huge market shares? The closest relative is NT and that is a hybrid, not purely micro. Modular and hybrid kernels (Linux and NT respectively) offer better external vs internal complexity tradeoffs; Linux and NT are internally complex since they do all the hard stuff, micorkernels are externally complex since someone else needs to do the hard work. Microkernels will shove this exact complexity elsewhere not make it go away.
- garmaine 9y agoThe most prolific (non-embedded) operating system on the planet is MINIX, a micro kernel based OS. On the embedded, medical, automotive, and aviation side there are plenty of micro kernel OS’s that give Linux a run for its money. Just FYI.
- zaarn 9y agoBut is that because it's a microkernel or for other reasons? Crash stability can be achieved in monolithic and modular kernels too, it's not unique to microkernels.
- digi_owl 9y agoWhile he has not voiced any direct criticism of the project that i recall, he has voiced concerns about the principle developers of it. Keep in mind that at one point he was so fed up with Kay Sievers that he announced he would not accept any kernel patches that originated from that person. I think it related to Sievers unilaterally deciding that the kernel, and not udev, should be responsible for loading firmwares, leading to the kernel devs scrambling to implement the required functionality. In the aftermath some kernel devs even pondered forking udev and bundling it with the kernel code as part of its userspace toolkit. And this was from before udev was merged with systemd (iirc).