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I think Linus was incredibly polite and helpful, I certainly wouldn't have been anything like as tolerant. I had barely got into the original article before mut

I think Linus was incredibly polite and helpful, I certainly wouldn't have been anything like as tolerant. I had barely got into the original article before muttering "What about the scheduler & preemption, you idiot" to myself. Anyone with any sort of OS background has all the points that Linus made drummed in them from the get-go, it's a shame the author apparently didn't do any even basic background reading. All the stuff Linus patiently explained has been well-understood for literally decades. Old farts myself often bemoan the fact that fewer and fewer people seem to understand how computers actually work. It's bad enough that the author didn't understand the consequences of what he was doing, what's really depressing is that so many other people thought he actually had a point :-(

mindentropy 7y ago
Not sure why you have been downvoted but even I too was gnashing my teeth. Also introducing unwanted complexity of cache coherence etc and linking irrelevant concepts to support his argument. Sigh! These are all well understood by RTOS firmware and Linux driver people. The author, if he has not understood the problem or what is happening should at least use the mailing lists, read on documentation etc to understand how things work rather than write a blog post blaming the kernel people assuming they have not thought enough while designing.
- crustycoder 7y ago
  Personally I'm not that surprised, criticism of any type is no longer PC. I think you nailed it with "well understood" - exactly so, anyone with an interest in this area knows about this stuff. It would have been fine if the post was along the lines of "I've observed XXX, there's clearly something strange going on" but as you say there was a misinformed leap to blame the kernel devs. That's not OK as bearing in mind the exposure the post got, there's a real danger that the misinformation it contains will become "accepted knowledge".

mindentropy 7y ago

Not sure why you have been downvoted but even I too was gnashing my teeth. Also introducing unwanted complexity of cache coherence etc and linking irrelevant concepts to support his argument. Sigh! These are all well understood by RTOS firmware and Linux driver people. The author, if he has not understood the problem or what is happening should at least use the mailing lists, read on documentation etc to understand how things work rather than write a blog post blaming the kernel people assuming they have not thought enough while designing.

crustycoder 7y ago
Personally I'm not that surprised, criticism of any type is no longer PC. I think you nailed it with "well understood" - exactly so, anyone with an interest in this area knows about this stuff. It would have been fine if the post was along the lines of "I've observed XXX, there's clearly something strange going on" but as you say there was a misinformed leap to blame the kernel devs. That's not OK as bearing in mind the exposure the post got, there's a real danger that the misinformation it contains will become "accepted knowledge".