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While I don't think this code is the best, these complaints are like disliking Shakespeare because his writing is archaic. Yeah, no shit. Good writing is relat

While I don't think this code is the best, these complaints are like disliking Shakespeare because his writing is archaic. Yeah, no shit. Good writing is relative to the norms and expectations of the audience, which are other kernel developers in this case. It’s written in an unsafe language. So is every other mainstream kernel. Double underscores everywhere, which are the bad alternative to namespaces seen in weak languages like C. It's the designated way to avoid symbol conflicts for system software. Cultural norms. Constants defined with lowercase and not actually marked as const. There aren't any constants in fs/file.c though? Do you mean the sysctls? Those are modifiable at runtime. WTF does “BITBIT_NR(nr)” do!? This is genuinely obscure without background knowledge. fs/file.c maintains a bitmap of bitmaps for performance optimization reasons, hence "bitbit". "nr" has been a standard abbreviation in this part of the kernel for decades. Abbreviations everywhere: ofdr, nfdt, fds, fs, etc… Terse identifiers are just a cultural norm in kernel code. old file descriptor table, new file descriptor table, file descriptors, filesystem, etc... Then there is a long-winded explanation of how they pack bits into an array of longs. Okay, why not make this a reusable module of code? Because C is a weak language, or because the Linux kernel is spaghetti with a dozen implementations of bit maps? Because this code is actually very tricky, performance sensitive, and basically unique in the kernel. The kernel has many things that could be de-duplicated, but I'm confident someone's tried refactoring this and failed for some reason or another, probably performance. Sorry… did I just see a data race just casually commented as “okay because it is faster if it’s horrifically unsafe? You're seeing one of the many design tradeoffs that are made to get good performance in the real world. The VFS code this file is part of is one of the most performance-critical components in the kernel and gets involved with all the other filesystem operations that happen, which on a unix system is essentially everything. The code (and cache footprint) are smaller if the safety burden is pushed off to other people here, which is more important than maintaining an ideal interface. This is some of the most battle-tested code in the world. It's fine if you don't want to modify it, but it's solid code that people have literally bet their lives on given the mildly terrifying use of Linux in safety-critical systems.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> disliking Shakespeare because his writing is archaic But... his writing is archaic. Not just quaintly archaic, like a novel from the 1800s, but literally requiring translation archaic. Worse still, the vast, vast majority of people "teaching" Shakespeare pronounce it wrong, which means most of the humour is lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04 The jokes don't work any more! The rhymes sound wrong! The whole thing is a farce. Theatre. We all pretend it is great English, whe in fact it isn't even English any more. It's taught because our teachers were taught it. Those teachers... and on. It's like the idiots still formatting cloud SSD virtual disks as-if they are physical RAID controllers with spinning rust. It's like the Hungarian notation identifier style people copied from the NT kernel code, even though the NT kernel people realised it was a mistake and moved on. The Linux kernel code would be crazy bad if it wasn't for tens of thousands of people beating on it until it has become merely mediocre. It will never be perfect, it'll never even be "good" code. It has too much inertia, too much history for that to ever happen.
- psd1 3y ago
  There's room for conflicting viewpoints of course, but Shakespeare is enjoyed in the original by English speakers in the 21st century, and academic consensus calls his language "Modern English" - as opposed to Middle English, which is a struggle to understand, or Old English, which very few people can grok today. So no, it requires no translation. I disagree completely that the humour is lost. There may be jokes I don't get, but that's more true for Futurama with all its 90s American telly references. Perhaps Chaucer would be a better example?
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    I studied Shakespeare in school from a textbook that had two columns: the original and the modern English translation. Something like this: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-shakespeare-side-by-side-in-a-modern-translation/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-shakespeare-side-by-side-... > So no, it requires no translation. It does for most students in most schools. Sure, there's some grey-haired academics that insist it doesn't need translation -- but they've spent a career learning Shakespearean English!

jiggawatts 3y ago

> disliking Shakespeare because his writing is archaic But... his writing is archaic. Not just quaintly archaic, like a novel from the 1800s, but literally requiring translation archaic. Worse still, the vast, vast majority of people "teaching" Shakespeare pronounce it wrong, which means most of the humour is lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04 The jokes don't work any more! The rhymes sound wrong! The whole thing is a farce. Theatre. We all pretend it is great English, whe in fact it isn't even English any more. It's taught because our teachers were taught it. Those teachers... and on. It's like the idiots still formatting cloud SSD virtual disks as-if they are physical RAID controllers with spinning rust. It's like the Hungarian notation identifier style people copied from the NT kernel code, even though the NT kernel people realised it was a mistake and moved on. The Linux kernel code would be crazy bad if it wasn't for tens of thousands of people beating on it until it has become merely mediocre. It will never be perfect, it'll never even be "good" code. It has too much inertia, too much history for that to ever happen.

psd1 3y ago
There's room for conflicting viewpoints of course, but Shakespeare is enjoyed in the original by English speakers in the 21st century, and academic consensus calls his language "Modern English" - as opposed to Middle English, which is a struggle to understand, or Old English, which very few people can grok today. So no, it requires no translation. I disagree completely that the humour is lost. There may be jokes I don't get, but that's more true for Futurama with all its 90s American telly references. Perhaps Chaucer would be a better example?
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I studied Shakespeare in school from a textbook that had two columns: the original and the modern English translation. Something like this: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-shakespeare-side-by-side-in-a-modern-translation/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-shakespeare-side-by-side-... > So no, it requires no translation. It does for most students in most schools. Sure, there's some grey-haired academics that insist it doesn't need translation -- but they've spent a career learning Shakespearean English!